I certainly didn't have much Java experience. Just reading some articles, and programming this game in Java 1.1 of all things! It still runs, try it! http://jon

I certainly didn't have much Java experience. Just reading some articles, and programming this game in Java 1.1 of all things! It still runs, try it! http://jonathanwatmough.com/jplanetoid/ptoidApplet.html http://jonathanwatmough.com/jplanetoid/ptoidApplet.html My point is that I fail to see how adding Vim or Emacs or some other IDE or framework actually helps you get your head round Java. It's only my opinion, but learning enough Java API to write serious Clojure programs involves hitting an O'Reilly reference, and having the Java class docs open in a web browser, with the absolute minimum of distractions from other sources. It may be unique to me (hopefully not), but Clojure was a drop-in replacement for Perl in my sketching and prototyping workflow that I follow during planning and design. Clojure has access to all the Java APIs, and with pure Java goodies such as drivers for Oracle, SQLite, SQLServer, it's easy to write code that runs well across Mac, Windows and GNU/Linux. None of this stuff needs an IDE, since by and large, just dropping .class files into an appropriate folder is most of the battle in Java/Clojure.