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Wow people are upvoting this FUD? > but setting it up is impractical for anybody who > isn't used to hack emacs and bash scripts all day This is Hacker N

Wow people are upvoting this FUD? > but setting it up is impractical for anybody who > isn't used to hack emacs and bash scripts all day This is Hacker News right? Having built websites in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure ... guess what? They all present you with equal challenges if you're not building trivial small websites on shared hosting. Getting a website up and running in Clojure is as simple as it gets. Compojure ships with a good webserver baked right in.

Raphael_Amiard 16y ago
> Getting a website up and running in Clojure is as simple as it gets. Well you first have to get clojure running. And that's not as simple as it gets
- masomenos 16y ago
  You piqued my curiosity, never having tried Clojure. My time from 0 to getting (the correct!) result of (+2 2) from Clojure's REPL was approximately 60 seconds. Pretty simple.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    It took you less than 60 seconds to install Java, compile Clojure, and start the REPL? :) I haven't actually used (or installed) Clojure, but most of the complaints (here and on proggit) appear to be by people who don't already know Java, and so have to figure out enough of the Java build process to build Clojure in the first place, even though a touted advantage of Clojure is that you don't have to deal with Java.
    - babblefrog 16y ago
      Probably already had a JRE installed (just about everybody does, I would expect), downloaded a pre-compiled clojure.jar, and ran it.
    - francoisdevlin 16y ago
      The advantage should be more properly stated that you don't have to deal with Java the language, but you still get Java the ecosystem. Using all of the supporting build & deployment stuff is actually seen as advantage with experienced Clojure guys.
    - golwengaud 16y ago
      I have no java (programming) experience, and it took me ~45 s: #apt-get install closure #closure user=> (+ 2 2) 4 Most of that 45 s was waiting for apt-get. Now it's not going to be this easy on platforms that don't have such nice package management (e.g. Windows). Furthermore, Raphael_Amiard makes a good point that there's a lot more infrastructure that has to go into web application development (or any other kind of application development, for that matter) than computing the sum of 2 and 2. Nonetheless, it just doesn't seem that hard. At worst, put a "clojure /path/to/project.lisp" in rc.local or equivalent. (Caveat: my web development experience consists entirely of a couple of toy projects I ran on my laptop for my own amusement. Take all this with a grain of salt.) EDITed for formatting.
      - 3d3mon 16y ago
        Just as easy for Windows. Use clojurebox. Double click the .exe file. http://clojure.bighugh.com/ http://clojure.bighugh.com/
      - dedward 16y ago
        The problem isn't that it's hard to get at the REPL (it's not) - it's envisioning how to use Clojure to do a full-scale web project. What's the workflow?
        eeperson 16y ago
        Using Clojure actually isn't that hard. It is basically the same amount of difficulty as any other compiled language. You can basically take any text editor and do a standard 'write->compile->run'. However, most people that are familiar with Lisp, prefer a more interactive development environment that allows you to make changes to a running app. Probably the most powerful environment for doing this is SLIME in Emacs. As a result this is what is mentioned the most. I think this tends to scare people off. I don't know why the Enclojure plugin for Netbeans isn't mentioned more. It provides an interactive development environment for Clojure in package that is much easier to digest for anyone who is familiar with an IDE.
      - Raphael_Amiard 16y ago
  - Raphael_Amiard 16y ago
    well i was more speaking of setting up clojure in a web development way, meaning, starting automatically your jetty server and website at the machine boot, which is pretty much a given if you use a LAMP setup. Also you don't code a website from a REPL, you need a proper developpement environnement, some way to manage your website dependencies, etc.. well, theses issues have been covered in lengths these last days, in a few articles, and the clojure people are well aware of it, and working on it, but for having done a serious website in clojure , let me say it's nowhere as automated or simple as setting up a LAMP server.
randallsquared 16y ago
Having built websites in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure ... guess what? They all present you with equal challenges if you're not building trivial small websites on shared hosting. I've built websites in PHP, Python, Common Lisp, and RXML/Pike. Some have been very small, and some have been medium-sized. I currently work on a several-hundred-thousand-line PHP codebase, and I don't think being in PHP has been a serious problem for it. I do agree that language infrastructure is more important for small projects, and language power is more important for large projects. I think it's critical to provide good language infrastructure precisely because of this, though, since virtually everyone starts out learning a language with a small project! It's really easy to bounce off of CL, when you're first starting out, as easily demonstrated by a survey of c.l.l (at least, when I paid attention there 2003-2007), and it's not because of the language itself; it's because the infrastructure is (was?) severely lacking. I think it's harder to build a good infrastructure with a more powerful language, ironically, because the power substitutes for things that would otherwise be infrastructure-related, and once you've learned enough of the language to work on infrastructure, you no longer care so much.

Raphael_Amiard 16y ago

> Getting a website up and running in Clojure is as simple as it gets. Well you first have to get clojure running. And that's not as simple as it gets

masomenos 16y ago
You piqued my curiosity, never having tried Clojure. My time from 0 to getting (the correct!) result of (+2 2) from Clojure's REPL was approximately 60 seconds. Pretty simple.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  It took you less than 60 seconds to install Java, compile Clojure, and start the REPL? :) I haven't actually used (or installed) Clojure, but most of the complaints (here and on proggit) appear to be by people who don't already know Java, and so have to figure out enough of the Java build process to build Clojure in the first place, even though a touted advantage of Clojure is that you don't have to deal with Java.
  - babblefrog 16y ago
    Probably already had a JRE installed (just about everybody does, I would expect), downloaded a pre-compiled clojure.jar, and ran it.
  - francoisdevlin 16y ago
    The advantage should be more properly stated that you don't have to deal with Java the language, but you still get Java the ecosystem. Using all of the supporting build & deployment stuff is actually seen as advantage with experienced Clojure guys.
  - golwengaud 16y ago
    I have no java (programming) experience, and it took me ~45 s: #apt-get install closure #closure user=> (+ 2 2) 4 Most of that 45 s was waiting for apt-get. Now it's not going to be this easy on platforms that don't have such nice package management (e.g. Windows). Furthermore, Raphael_Amiard makes a good point that there's a lot more infrastructure that has to go into web application development (or any other kind of application development, for that matter) than computing the sum of 2 and 2. Nonetheless, it just doesn't seem that hard. At worst, put a "clojure /path/to/project.lisp" in rc.local or equivalent. (Caveat: my web development experience consists entirely of a couple of toy projects I ran on my laptop for my own amusement. Take all this with a grain of salt.) EDITed for formatting.
    - 3d3mon 16y ago
      Just as easy for Windows. Use clojurebox. Double click the .exe file. http://clojure.bighugh.com/ http://clojure.bighugh.com/
    - dedward 16y ago
      The problem isn't that it's hard to get at the REPL (it's not) - it's envisioning how to use Clojure to do a full-scale web project. What's the workflow?
      - eeperson 16y ago
        Using Clojure actually isn't that hard. It is basically the same amount of difficulty as any other compiled language. You can basically take any text editor and do a standard 'write->compile->run'. However, most people that are familiar with Lisp, prefer a more interactive development environment that allows you to make changes to a running app. Probably the most powerful environment for doing this is SLIME in Emacs. As a result this is what is mentioned the most. I think this tends to scare people off. I don't know why the Enclojure plugin for Netbeans isn't mentioned more. It provides an interactive development environment for Clojure in package that is much easier to digest for anyone who is familiar with an IDE.
    - Raphael_Amiard 16y ago
- Raphael_Amiard 16y ago
  well i was more speaking of setting up clojure in a web development way, meaning, starting automatically your jetty server and website at the machine boot, which is pretty much a given if you use a LAMP setup. Also you don't code a website from a REPL, you need a proper developpement environnement, some way to manage your website dependencies, etc.. well, theses issues have been covered in lengths these last days, in a few articles, and the clojure people are well aware of it, and working on it, but for having done a serious website in clojure , let me say it's nowhere as automated or simple as setting up a LAMP server.

randallsquared 16y ago

Having built websites in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure ... guess what? They all present you with equal challenges if you're not building trivial small websites on shared hosting. I've built websites in PHP, Python, Common Lisp, and RXML/Pike. Some have been very small, and some have been medium-sized. I currently work on a several-hundred-thousand-line PHP codebase, and I don't think being in PHP has been a serious problem for it. I do agree that language infrastructure is more important for small projects, and language power is more important for large projects. I think it's critical to provide good language infrastructure precisely because of this, though, since virtually everyone starts out learning a language with a small project! It's really easy to bounce off of CL, when you're first starting out, as easily demonstrated by a survey of c.l.l (at least, when I paid attention there 2003-2007), and it's not because of the language itself; it's because the infrastructure is (was?) severely lacking. I think it's harder to build a good infrastructure with a more powerful language, ironically, because the power substitutes for things that would otherwise be infrastructure-related, and once you've learned enough of the language to work on infrastructure, you no longer care so much.