Hi Andy Thanks for the moderate and reasoned response!
I've worked on Open Source projects myself and realise the realities. But this is a big project, and ignoring the needs of new Windows users is surely hurting it significantly? If this was prioritised, I suspect someone could be found to do this. Have you looked? As I keep saying, Haskell seems to have prioritised this, and make getting started easy for Windows, Mac and Linux. At the very least, some clear and up-to-date instructions on the Getting Started page and Leningen homepage would be good start. Simply assuming that Windows users will be able to figure out all these steps while working in the dark is surely unrealistic? Linking to a broken install programme, and offering a .bat that uses wget without explaining how to get it working on Windows is seriously unhelpful, I would suggest... On Saturday, 25 October 2014 15:49:21 UTC+1, Andy Fingerhut wrote: > > Geoff: > > I hesitated before replying, because I was concerned that anything I could > say other than "we'll get right on that" will sound at best like an excuse, > or at its worst like a dismissal. The tone I am hoping to achieve here is > a neutral factual explanation. Please try to read it that way. I may also > be leaving out some relevant facts due to my ignorance. If so, hopefully > someone else will add more facts to the conversation. > > Put yourself in the shoes of someone who maintains Clojure or Leiningen. > You don't personally use Windows for your development, and have no interest > in learning how to create a Windows installer. You also don't have an > interest in paying someone to create one. You are certainly open to the > possibility of someone else creating one, and linking to their results if > they produce something useful. > > One or a few people do, but there are problems with them, or they install > the most recent version available at the time, but new Clojure/Leiningen > versions are released later. Those people decide it isn't in their > interest to improve/update them. It is a (nearly) thankless job, and other > things are higher on their priority list. > > I think that is where we are. > > Andy (who has no interest in learning how to create a Windows installer) > > On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Geoff Caplan <ghca...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> Thanks for the tips, Jony - I've finally made it. >> >> Here's the contrast between setting up Haskell and setting up Clojure: >> >> *HASKELL* >> >> 1) Go to the homepage and download the Haskell Platform as an .exe >> 2) Install and use >> >> *CLOJURE* >> >> 1) Go to the homepage and discover I have to go to the Leiningen site >> 2) Go the Leiningen site and get directed to the leiningen-win-installer >> site >> 3) Download the win-installer and discover that it's targeting an >> outdated version of Leiningen, which is academic as it doesn't work anyway >> 4) Go back to the Leiningen site and download the .bat file >> 5) Discover that it assumes you have wget >> 6) Find a Windows version of wget and put it in the path >> 7) Finally get self-install to run >> >> No help for any of this on the Clojure or the Leiningen site. It's >> relatively straightforward once you know what to do, but it's far from >> straightforward to figure it out. >> >> Given that Windows owns almost 90% of the desktop the community must be >> haemorrhaging >> potential members by placing so many obstacles in the path of new users. >> Millions of LAMP developers are used to coding on Windows and deploying to >> *nix. Given that one of the JVM's main selling points is its cross-platform >> capabilities, it just doesn't make sense that the community seems so >> *nix-centric. >> >> If you want to promote adoption, surely you should emulate the Haskell >> example and offer an up-to-date, community supported .exe install that >> actually works? >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Clojure" group. >> To post to this group, send email to clo...@googlegroups.com >> <javascript:> >> Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with >> your first post. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> clojure+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:> >> 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+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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