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The very reason I find Lisps enjoyable is all the things an editor can do for you with a Lisp. Smartparens, rainbow parens, easy eval of forms (+ pprinting, mac
by auganov 6y ago
The very reason I find Lisps enjoyable is all the things an editor can do for you with a Lisp. Smartparens, rainbow parens, easy eval of forms (+ pprinting, macroexpand, inline replace etc), jump to definition, for Clojure - contextual awareness of the namespace and REPL session you're in. Probably forgetting a number of things. Without these there wouldn't be much for me left to like about programming in a Lisp. As far as I'm concerned, learning to use the editor well is as important as learning the language itself.
I only know Emacs well. Checked out VS code for Clojure a while ago and it wasn't even close. Clojure IDE "Cursive" is supposed to be good, but never tried and not sure if you want to invest time in an ad hoc IDE. It seems to me lispers don't want to discourage people by recommending Emacs, but at the end of the day, most people who stick with it tend to be Emacs users.
- simongray 6y ago> Clojure IDE "Cursive" is supposed to be good, but never tried and not sure if you want to invest time in an ad hoc IDE. Cursive is just a Clojure plugin for IntelliJ , nothing ad-hoc about it. IntelliJ is the favourite IDE for lots of people - especially Java devs - so it's an obvious choice for Clojure developers. I've programmed Clojure professionally for several years now and have seen maybe 50 different editor setups in person and I've yet to be significantly impressed by emacs. It does seem to offer most of the stuff that comes out of the box in IntelliJ (with the Cursive plugin), but only after many hours of setup and days to weeks of getting comfortable inside its somewhat antiquated UI paradigm. Nothing against emacs, but I just haven't seen the great case for using it over something like Cursive, other than if you need to develop commercial software and don't wanna buy a commercial licence for Cursive. A bunch of people at my old job actually switched from emacs to IntelliJ a couple of years into their Clojure journey. I do see the obvious advantage of using emacs if you're already a heavy emacs user, however. And if some Clojure-specific kiler feature pops up in emacs, I'll probably switch to emacs too. Until then, I'll stick to Cursive which covers all of my various Clojure needs very well out of the box.