3 ms·

The runtimes themselves may be great, but the tooling is bloated and uncomfortable. Every time I use Clojure, I am reminded how much I hate using Java. The err

The runtimes themselves may be great, but the tooling is bloated and uncomfortable. Every time I use Clojure, I am reminded how much I hate using Java. The error messages alone are enough to turn me away. So is having to set up a whole Leiningen project just to get started. A Clojure without Java would be very attractive to me.

pjmlp 6y ago
There is nothing else that gets close to the world promised to us by Xerox PARC. Don't blame Java for the issues that are Clojure's fault. The only Lisps that can match such tooling are Allegro and LispWorks.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Well, I owned a Xerox Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1987. True, a great programming environment, but the situation is so much better today. For example, I own a LispWorks Professional license, and the support and quality of the product is fantastic. My friends at Franz have similar quality products like Allegro and AllegroGraph. Even Clojure+Cider or Haskell+Intero or Haskell+VSCode (easiest to set up) is arguably better than dealing with lack of deployment options for Lisp Machines.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Yeah, let me take the opporunity to thank you for the books.
    - mark_l_watson 6y ago
      you are welcome!
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I usually use Cider + Emacs for Clojure. Cider let’s you interactively check values and makes error messages more understandable, at least to me. I think that many Clojure programmers skip the JVM and use ClojureScript with node. Personally, given my history with Java I find that Lisp + JVM ecosystem is why I use Clojure sometimes instead of Common Lisp.
Graziano_M 6y ago
For writing simple scripts and stuff I like to use babashka[1], which is a simple clojure interpreter that's compile to a binary, so there's no JVM or leiningen to worry about. Of course, it's slower than the JVM hosted clojure once the JVM is started, so it's basically best for simple tasks. [1] https://babashka.org/ https://babashka.org/

pjmlp 6y ago

There is nothing else that gets close to the world promised to us by Xerox PARC. Don't blame Java for the issues that are Clojure's fault. The only Lisps that can match such tooling are Allegro and LispWorks.

mark_l_watson 6y ago
Well, I owned a Xerox Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1987. True, a great programming environment, but the situation is so much better today. For example, I own a LispWorks Professional license, and the support and quality of the product is fantastic. My friends at Franz have similar quality products like Allegro and AllegroGraph. Even Clojure+Cider or Haskell+Intero or Haskell+VSCode (easiest to set up) is arguably better than dealing with lack of deployment options for Lisp Machines.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Yeah, let me take the opporunity to thank you for the books.
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    you are welcome!

mark_l_watson 6y ago

I usually use Cider + Emacs for Clojure. Cider let’s you interactively check values and makes error messages more understandable, at least to me. I think that many Clojure programmers skip the JVM and use ClojureScript with node. Personally, given my history with Java I find that Lisp + JVM ecosystem is why I use Clojure sometimes instead of Common Lisp.

Graziano_M 6y ago

For writing simple scripts and stuff I like to use babashka[1], which is a simple clojure interpreter that's compile to a binary, so there's no JVM or leiningen to worry about. Of course, it's slower than the JVM hosted clojure once the JVM is started, so it's basically best for simple tasks. [1] https://babashka.org/ https://babashka.org/