On Jun 28, 2010, at 2:26 PM, cageface wrote: > So I wonder how much making the first few baby steps easier is really > going to help the uptake of Clojure. I have to imagine that the kind > of person that can't figure out a CLASSPATH is going to have his head > explode when he has to figure out how to restructure all his > iterations in terms of loop/recur.
FWIW, for THIS newbie the core language issues are not a problem at all, they are a joy. I'm a long time lisper and I've been teaching lisp and functional programming for a long time. For me and many of my students loop/recur is fine, and all of the other features of the core language are natural and beautiful. It's setting up a working environment (reliably, with a clojure-aware editor and CLASSPATHs handled correctly etc.) that makes MY head explode -- well, not quite explode, but I've been close to having smoke pour out of my ears and I've only been saved by a long-ago student who happens to be a Clojurian who has also been very generous with his time (hi Chas!). My problems are not with FP or with other fancy Clojure features (e.g. I love the concurrency and just bought a 48 core node for this alone!), but the installation issues are a big pain for me and some of the Java world assumptions about how projects should be set up are also unfamiliar and confusing at first. I know this is just one data point (or maybe a cluster if you count my students), but it's wrong to assume that everyone who wants to start with Clojure, and everyone who is capable of dealing with its core language features, will know how to deal with CLASSPATH or have experience with git or build tools or anything else. BTW what I'm currently planning to teach with in the fall (to students who will have at least one programming course under their belts but possibly none in Java), is NetBeans with Enclojure. -Lee -- 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
