On Jun 29, 2010, at 1:05 AM, Mike Meyer wrote: >> Yes emacs has built-in paren matching but emacs (like vi) is something >> that has to be learned, not all newcomers will know it, I don't want >> to force my students to use it (although I use it) > > But you're willing to force them to use some other editor?
The ideal is to provide an editor that can be used without effort because it follows the standard interface conventions of the platform. That's what's so helpful about the editors in MCL, DrScheme, Processing, etc. Each has fancy stuff too, available through platform-conventional menus etc., but you don't need a lesson to do basic editing tasks (as you do with emacs and vi). > See, I find this funny. Getting emacs to do clojure indentation is > pretty much exactly as hard as getting clojure to use some third party > library: dump clojure-mode.el onto your load-path, and then load > it. Not true. I had several hiccups in the process of getting emacs clojure mode to work (maybe because I first tried an outdated way and then that left stuff that clashed the next thing I tried... there are a a couple of clojure-mode tools/installers out there) and so have others -- if you check the list archives you'll see that periodic calls for help with this. > Considering that I've never seen an IDE that I thought had an editor > that was "good enough for real use", I find that statement highly > subjective. What I meant here was pretty simple: New users can begin using the editor without any specific instructions about how to use the editor per se, and a semester later they can be writing substantial programs in the same editor without feeling like it's holding them back. In my experience that's true of the editors in many IDEs for many languages. > Basically, you need someone to either a) write an editor for clojure, > or b) provide instructions for setting up a suitable java-sourced > editor (so it runs everywhere) to do clojure indentation, then bundle > all that with clojure and clojure-contrib and a little bit of support? I think that several versions of "nearly the right stuff" are available but that the bundling/instructions could be made a little more clear for newcomers in every case that I know of (each case maybe needing a slightly different tweak). -- 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
