On Jun 28, 2010, at 3:03 PM, Brian Hurt wrote: > This is the question I had on the blog post- what is meant by a "newbie"? > Specifically, what sort of newbie is Clojure wanting to attract? One of the > "complaints" the original poster had was that you had a choice of editors. > Of the pool of potential Clojure users, how many of them are not already > familiar with one (or more) of vi, emacs, or eclipse/other Java IDE? If not > 0, then it surely must be very small. That you can adopt Clojure without > having to learn a new editor is a huge plus in my book (if I have to use your > development environment to learn your language, I'm highly unlikely to learn > your language).
I've used emacs for decades and that's what I'm currently using to write Clojure code, but (A) setting it up to work with Clojure was a pain (not just for me but for many others who have written to the list describing their problems), and (B) I want to teach Clojure to students who don't necessarily know emacs. Some of these students may know another editor in your list, but many won't and many will never have touched Java. There are several things in the Clojure community that are close to providing what's needed for this class of newbies, and as I mentioned in another thread I'm planning to use NetBeans/Enclojure because I think it's currently the closest. For a couple of years I've taught some courses using Processing (processing.org), which is basically Java but with an IDE and some libraries and other bells and whistles that make it really easy for total newbies (esp art students) to download a single thing and start making cool stuff. I think it's quite popular in several circles in part because of this ease of getting started. From my Lisp-world perspective it's something like working with the old MCL or LispWorks or DrScheme. You get this one thing (download or install from CD) and then you're ready to go, with a language-aware editor that obeys your OS's normal interface conventions and lets you run code, etc., without worrying about installing or learning other things. What I'd like for Clojure is something along these lines. I think that NetBeans/Enclojure is maybe sort of almost there, as is MCLIDE (but that's not cross platform), and maybe also Eclipse/Counterclockwise (although I found Eclipse's interface confusing, and there was no Clojure indentation when I last tried it, so I didn't get far). I am NOT suggesting that there be a single "official" IDE (as I think someone else suggested). I am just saying that having one option that provides a simple, idiot-proof way to start (with a single download/installation, a reasonable editor, a way to run code, and a way to handle classpaths or at least simple instructions about where to put things so that they will be found) would open the door to a certain class of newbies that includes me and a fair number of students. -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
