Hi All, very new to clojure, so thought my experience may be relevant.
Initially, the java aspect is a bit daunting. However, I don't believe you need to know java in order to take advantage of all the java interop features of clojure. All that you really need is to understand how to read java API documentation and understand the way clojure can interface with java libraries. This in itself may appear to be a big hurdle at first, but its not that hard provided you just have a go. My main advice would be to use Leiningen to help manage things, ignore maven etc and use the repl to experiment. Just reading the docs is insufficient - you have to sit at the repl and try using a few java libs and it will become clearer as you progress. I also find looking at other clojure code and how others have used java very useful. There are also some good books out there which are quite useful. I'm currently reading The Joy of Clojure and while tastes and mileage may differ, I am finding it a really interesting and informative book. >From a documentation standpoint, I've not found it too bad. The cheatsheet has been very useful and using things like find-doc etc help to narrow down the search space. I do suspect that as the complexity of what I'm trying to do increases, I will likely need to understand java better, I suspect that is a way down the road yet and it will come in little pieces as I need them. Perhaps my only criticism with the docs are that there may be too many documents out there covering the 'getting started' aspect. I'm using emacs, slime and lein and it has all worked fine, but there was quite a bit of conflicting and in some cases incorrect information out there. Much of it seems to have made it far more complicated than it ended up being. I would possibly be good if clojure.org, clojuredocs.org and dev.clojure.org had just one definitive/official getting started document. I'd go further and suggest that document should really just be "download lein; chmod u+x lein and lein install. Then, one official document for clojure+emacs, clojure+vim, clojure+eclipse etc and pointers to other tweaks/setups. However, in general, I think things are pretty good for such a young/new language and I'm having a lot of fun! Is there a document which covers the changes in 1.3 in more detail than the official release notes - especailly one which may explain how some of the changes can impact on past idioms etc. For example, it took me a while to find (with-redefs ...) as an alternative to using (bindings ...) for doing things like mocking functions for testing - I'm still not 100% sure this is even the right approach, but seems more correct than using ^:dynamic just to enable a test harness to work. Tim -- 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
