In browsing this group I see this topic has been brought up several times over the past 3 years, so I apologize for revisiting it.
I just downloaded Clojure and was excited to try it, but so far trying to move beyond simple examples has often resulted in me making a mistake that yields a Java exception that presumably is helpful to the people who wrote Clojure, but doesn't provide me enough direction or sense of what I did wrong. Maybe improvement has been made in Clojure's so far, but it's very hard for me to think about working in a language that doesn't try to identify on what line and where on that line it encountered an error with my input. And when I get a Java-exception-style error from Clojure, it does me no good to copy it in to Google, because I get all these responses from Java programmers that have nothing to do with Clojure. I think it will be hard for Clojure to move beyond the fringe without its own, unique, Google-searchable error messages and without helpful positional error feedback for new people like me, who are maybe not used to its syntax. Here's one example where recursion and lack of positional error feedback make it hard for me, as someone coming from Java, to spot the error (and seeing "ClassCastException" threw me off and had me wondering where/how I had done something like that): user=> (defn fac [n] (if (= n 1) 1 (* n fac (- n 1)))) #'user/fac user=> (fac 3) java.lang.ClassCastException: user$fac cannot be cast to java.lang.Number (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0) I will check back in on Clojure to see if it becomes more friendly for beginners and kids. Thanks for making it and working on it. =) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
