I agree with Sean on the near-orthogonality of sysadmin skills and the skills needed to get a lot of Clojure as a language. I have precious few of the former but not of the latter. And just today I had a very capable undergrad student with programming experience in a couple of languages (but not Java), starting a project for which a lisp-like language would make the most sense, say that although he saw that Clojure would be great he might just work in DrScheme since he could easily download it and have a functional IDE. This student can definitely deal with "sexpr syntax, immutable data structures, iteration through recursion, concurrency etc." I've seen him learn a new language and complete a really incredible project in it within a couple of weeks. But cageface's instructions will only get him a REPL, and not even get him contrib, the classpath details to allow him to load files, or an editor that can indent properly for the language and match parentheses. Some day he should probably learn enough about Java and sysadmin stuff to deal with this, but right now he just wants to dig into his project which doesn't have anything to do with that stuff.
Someone else mentioned that maybe part of the problem is that there are several different "simple" ways to get started, and this may have been part of my own problem. I installed one of the emacs clojure modes from the "getting started" page (or maybe two?) and then later tried to install slime and I think they fought with each other, with elpa saying something was already installed and quitting. It wasn't obvious how to start over because I didn't realize that things were in my .emacs and .emacs.d (if I recall correctly). And after watching one of Lau's screencasts I realized I also had to put copies of clojure.jar and clojure-contrib.jar in my .emacs.d, but that was not obvious to me previously... -Lee On Mar 22, 2010, at 5:48 PM, Sean Devlin wrote: > There are a ton of people who are ready for dabbling with Clojure but > aren't ready for production systems. You'd be surprised how linearly > independent system administration skills and software development > skills really are. They aren't quite orthogonal, but it's amazingly > close. > > On Mar 22, 5:36 pm, cageface <milese...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'll certainly agree that it should be as easy as possible to get >> started in Clojure, but I really don't think that the kind of people >> that can't use anything without a windows installer are going to get >> very far with Clojure in any case. >> >> I mean, if it's too much to install java, unzip a file and run: >> java -cp clojure.jar clojure.main >> >> As the getting_started page suggests, what are you going to do with >> sexpr syntax, immutable data structures, iteration through recursion, >> concurrency etc? Clojure might at some point mature into the kind of >> language that has something to offer for people that need a lot more >> hand holding but clearly it's a bit of a wild west environment at the >> moment. > > -- > 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 > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words > "REMOVE ME" as the subject. -- Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College 893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359 lspec...@hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/ Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438 Check out Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines: http://www.springer.com/10710 - http://gpemjournal.blogspot.com/ -- 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 To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
