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I am a Java developer by day and I fell in love with Clojure sometime ago. I have to give the language credit, because it taught me some new important concepts.

I am a Java developer by day and I fell in love with Clojure sometime ago. I have to give the language credit, because it taught me some new important concepts. After a break of couple of months (a year?) I went back to write some simple Clojure stuff - only to find out that the problem with error messages still persists: it's really easy to misuse some function here and there - especially if you don't use them on a daily basis - and sometimes tracking the actual source of the error/exception is almost impossible, even in a such developer-friendly IDE as Cursive. I can see how that can be absolutely discouraging for the beginners, even for people that are coming from Java backgrounds. Until that core problem is not fixed, it will never become a mainstream choice of a language.

puredanger 10y ago
The new spec library is being applied to clojure.core and will provide more precise errors at the point where an invalid value is introduced, rather than several layers down the stack.
nickik 10y ago
You are right. It is a big problem. Its hard to do because you want to avoid complicated parsing and compilers. You don't want to put in lots of costume code. Finally, I think the next version of Clojure will be able to make a big step. Spec improves multible problem points, error messages is one of them. It will take some time until the tooling around Spec is ready, but the data that spec provides is very nice for tools.