I'm always a little amused when people highlight the fragmentation of tools as a problem, and their solution is to propose a new tool.
Just joking :-) . Of course I'd never want to discourage innovation and investment in the Clojure tools space. I'm one of the people who likes my tools to be OSS and I'm extremely happy with CCW already, but by all means go for it if you think there is demand. However what would be really great is a bit more refactoring / abstraction / construction / adoption of the underlying libraries that different IDEs need, so that functionality can be shared across IDEs without reinventing the wheel all the time. A good positive example of this is CCW using nREPL for example, but I'm sure much more could be done to convert other IDE features into independent, composable libraries. I'm thinking of stuff like stacktrace interpreting, namespace / object introspection, doc searching, auto-completion, code style warnings, type checking, REPL interaction etc. All of these would make good standalone projects, and it would make it much easier for IDEs to put together a comprehensive solution if these were designed / maintained with the explicit objective of being consumable by different IDEs. On Saturday, 27 July 2013 12:54:58 UTC+1, Colin Fleming wrote: > > Hi all, > > I was planning to wait a little longer before going public, but since it's > pretty relevant to the other IntelliJ thread going on at the moment I > thought I'd jump in. For the last couple of months of happy unemployment > I've been working on a fork of La Clojure which is now about 70% migrated > to Clojure and significantly improved. It's a lot of work to develop a tool > like this, and one of the options I'm considering is starting a company to > develop it as a commercial product - JetBrains have never maintained > development of La Clojure very actively. I've been doing a little market > research but there's really not much data around about whether there are > enough people working with Clojure to sustain a product like that, and also > the community is currently very focused on open source. > > One problem is that the IDE space is already fairly fractured - there's > Emacs and CCW, Clooj, Sublime Text and the promise of Light Table at some > point, and of course the current public version of La Clojure. But there's > still not a great option for something that's powerful but easy to use - > CCW is probably the closest thing to this right now. However I think it's > telling that a large fraction of people in the State of Clojure 2012 survey > still identified development tools as a major pain point. > > I think that the IntelliJ platform is a fantastic base to build something > like this on. Clojure as a language makes it pretty challenging to develop > a lot of the great functionality that JetBrains are famous for, but I think > there's scope to do a lot of great things. Certainly for mixed Clojure/Java > projects it would be difficult to beat, but even for Clojure only projects > I can imagine a lot of fantastic functionality built on their > infrastructure. My plan would be to release a standalone IDE and a plugin > for people using IntelliJ Ultimate for web dev, Ruby/Python or whatever. > Since it's mostly Clojure now (and I'm migrating what's left as I get to > it) there's a real possibility of a Clojure plugin/extension API. I > envision charging PyCharm/RubyMine type prices, say $200 for company > licenses or $100 for individual developers. > > So, I'd love to hear what people think. I'd appreciate it if we could stay > away from the politics of open source vs proprietary - several people have > told me privately that they'd rather use OSS and that's fine, proprietary > isn't for everyone. What I'd like to know is if the idea is appealing to > many people here? > > In case it's a concern for anyone, I've discussed this with JetBrains. > > Thanks for any feedback, > > Cheers, > Colin > -- -- 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 --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
