On Jul 8, 2011, at 1:19 AM, Ken Wesson wrote: > > If your programming experience lies elsewhere, or you're new to > programming altogether, _insert something here_. > > The last one is maybe the trickiest. Best might be a good text editor > for programming that isn't Emacs, combined with leiningen. Someone had > been working on a lightweight Clojure IDE/editor here recently but I > don't know the current status of that.
I'd like to hear more about this IDE/editor if it's still a going concern. I tried to find an editor for a setup like this but was unable to find one that really fit the bill, with a major sticking point being what I consider minimal Lisp editing features: bracket matching and language-aware auto-re-indenting (and syntax coloring wouldn't hurt). > I'm not so sure. For newbs to it, emacs has a steep learning curve > even if you avoid any installation hiccups. Certainly true, and this is one of the other reasons that I taught with Eclipse/CCW rather than an emacs setup last year. But with a well-configured modern emacs some of this can be ameliorated; e.g. there are Mac versions in which you can use multiple windows for different buffers in an OS native way, and use OS native navigation techniques, and find commands in menus, etc. My dream installer would produce as friendly a setup as possible, with versions for most common platforms, and if this existed then I think that students could go from zero to knowing what they need to know for an edit/run cycle on this setup in one session. Yes they could spend years mastering it, but they could do real work without mastering it or knowing anything about how to tinker with it. I agree that the emacs interface learning curve would be the roughest spot in this particular setup, but I think it would be manageable and worth it to get the positives. > Of course, emacs > setup for Clojure that works painlessly out of the box wouldn't be a > bad thing, but I'm not sure it's a priority compared to getting a > truly newbie-friendly installation option up there and documented for > people that would be intimidated by Eclipse and Netbeans and would > have kittens if suddenly confronted with emacs. :) A lot of the bad complexity of Eclipse (and I guess Netbeans, though I have less experience there) has to do with things that will be handled elegantly by leiningen from the command line in an emacs/lein setup. I guess I would rank the emacs/slime/lein installation/configuration problem as a high priority because I think that solving it would produce a good way for newbies to get started with just one step (with the downside of the emacs interface learning curve, to whatever extent that can't be addressed via configuration) while also providing an environment that works well for advanced users. At least in my own case I'm pretty sure that if the emacs/slime/lein installation/configuration problem was really solved well then I would switch to that as my teaching environment (and also as my research coding environment). BTW I'm an old lisper who has lived a lot in emacs but I've mostly avoided having to tinker with it, so the hoops that I had to jump through to set things up for Clojure didn't come naturally to me. Part of this is probably because I spent a fair amount of time using Lisp machines and then a long stretch using MCL which had the wonderful FRED (FRED Resembles Emacs Deliberately) editor that combined all of the power of Emacs with single-drag installation and a thoroughly OS (Mac) native interface. FRED still lives on in some forms, including MCLIDE, which has Clojure support (but it's Mac only and has some other issues). -Lee -- 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
