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> ...had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers. To be fair the community itself, as humans, was very welcoming to newcomers. Really sup

> ...had a spike in popularity despite being very hostile to newcomers. To be fair the community itself, as humans, was very welcoming to newcomers. Really super nice and helpful folks. If anything was "hostile" it was the dominance of emacs and very limited options for other tooling. That, and the horrifically unhelpful leaky abstractions in the stack trace when something went wrong. It's a big step, if you don't already know emacs to learn emacs (at a fairly advanced level) AND a new very different programming language. I see now there's a vscode option with Calva. I haven't tried it. Might do that someday. Really wanted to like this language!

gleenn 2y ago
Cursive plugin for IntelliJ is a fantastic option, it's not free but it is excellent.
- aeonik 2y ago
  it's nice, but I used to write Java, and even getting IntelliJ setup on my laptop took a lot of fiddling with JVM versions and getting it to recognize my Clojure install. To this day, I will still have weird issues where Cursive won't run a project, and Emacs will. All that being said, I do really like Cursive.
  - cess11 2y ago
    I use https://sdkman.io/ https://sdkman.io/ to manage JVM versions, have you tried that? I haven't used Cursive, maybe it does something weird, but in general IntelliJ seems to accept it just fine in my everyday work.
ARandomerDude 2y ago
clojure-lsp and clj-kondo work with any editor and are both excellent. https://github.com/clojure-lsp/clojure-lsp https://github.com/clojure-lsp/clojure-lsp https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo I've always used (Neo)Vim with Clojure.
yungporko 2y ago
the tooling is the reason i gave up when i was interested in learning clojure. everywhere pretty much said that emacs was the "correct" editor to use for clojure, i tried it out for a bit but ultimately learning a new language and a new editor at the same time was just too big of an ask. i tried calva with vscode afterwards but it was basically the same thing, calva has paredit which overrides the keyboard navigation and there was no way to disable it. somebody had asked for the option to disable it on the github but the creator said something along the lines of calva without paredit wasn't the way he wanted it to be used, so i just picked another language to learn.
- cospaia 2y ago
  Wow. I'm the creator of Calva and I can tell you that I do not have an opinion on how to use it. I would never say something like that, and now I wonder what I could have said that was interpreted this way... By default Calva Paredit overrides three or so keyboard shortcuts. This is to help the users to not accidentally delete brackets, which in turn keeps the support questions down about broken Clojure code. I have tried to make it super easy to disable these overrides. There's a command for it. There's a button in the toolbar for it, and there's a setting for it. There's also a setting for removing all Paredit bindings, even those that are not overriding any default ones. (This setting is for people who use Paredit, but want to provide their own shortcuts entirely.)
  - yungporko 2y ago
    i'm pretty sure this is the thread i saw, but at the time it hadn't been closed yet: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva-paredit/issues/10 https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva-paredit/issues/1... if there's now a way to disable paredit entirely then i might check it out again some time in the bear future
neilyio 2y ago
I'll second that the popular tooling, while powerful and reliable, its just not user friendly. The official Clojure CLI, for example, is just plain confusing, and that's most people's first impression to the entire ecosystem. The config files, while they use the wonderful `.edn` format, are also not intuitive. Newcomers are the most likely people to encounter the most amount of error messages... which are famously difficult to read. And that's before you even get into REPL configuration, which involves coordination with your editor process, a client process, and a server process. Even if you have a tool like Calva or CIDER managing it for you, you'll still get confused when something goes wrong unless you grok all the moving parts. Even if you figure that all out, you still don't have Parinfer or equivalents setup yet in your editor. Also, clojure-lsp tends to require some configuration to get working the way you want. And that's before you get started with ClojureScript, which brings the complexity to another level entirely. Despite all this, I love Clojure. It's an expert's language, even though it shouldn't have to be. Once you learn this stuff, you respect why much of this complexity exists. It's inherent to the amount of power the language gives you. But doesn't mean we can't make it easier to use and get started with.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > The official Clojure CLI, for example, is just plain confusing, and that's most people's first impression to the entire ecosystem. The config files, while they use the wonderful `.edn` format, are also not intuitive. I completely agree; it is unfortunate they don't spend more time officially recommending leiningen.org. A beginner attempting to use the built-in CLI is going to lead to a poor first 3 months.
astrashe2 2y ago
This matches my experience as an amateur programmer. The initial hill was steep, but I don't think it was because people weren't friendly. There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's sometimes easier to find correct answers for Clojure. Clojure itself is very clean and consistent, it's got a lot of polish to it, which makes it comparatively easy to learn. And there isn't that much of it. But for a long time the tooling was hard. That's far less of a problem than it used to be. deps.edn and shadow-cljs both made things easier, as has Cursive. People say nice things about Calva, but I don't know it. I'm a big fan. Babashka alone is enough to make learning Clojure worthwhile. Also, for someone like me, it's kind of nice that it feels almost finished. Once you learn it, you know it, and now that the tooling has settled down a bit you don't have to keep running to keep up.
- hluska 2y ago
  People posting the wrong information is a great opportunity for a community to explain why it’s wrong. We lost that take on community and it’s a major loss for our entire industry. It’s remarkably hard for people to figure out why they’re wrong when they’re wrong. I don’t think the solution is the Usenet-esque “you are wrong and your breeding is suspect” way. But there’s a very good place in the middle and I’d really like to find that place. Business wise, I think we’re using the wrong paradigm in some major places. Maybe we can beat that while I’m still alive and that would be a net win for our whole craft.

gleenn 2y ago

Cursive plugin for IntelliJ is a fantastic option, it's not free but it is excellent.

aeonik 2y ago
it's nice, but I used to write Java, and even getting IntelliJ setup on my laptop took a lot of fiddling with JVM versions and getting it to recognize my Clojure install. To this day, I will still have weird issues where Cursive won't run a project, and Emacs will. All that being said, I do really like Cursive.
- cess11 2y ago
  I use https://sdkman.io/ https://sdkman.io/ to manage JVM versions, have you tried that? I haven't used Cursive, maybe it does something weird, but in general IntelliJ seems to accept it just fine in my everyday work.

ARandomerDude 2y ago

clojure-lsp and clj-kondo work with any editor and are both excellent. https://github.com/clojure-lsp/clojure-lsp https://github.com/clojure-lsp/clojure-lsp https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo I've always used (Neo)Vim with Clojure.

yungporko 2y ago

the tooling is the reason i gave up when i was interested in learning clojure. everywhere pretty much said that emacs was the "correct" editor to use for clojure, i tried it out for a bit but ultimately learning a new language and a new editor at the same time was just too big of an ask. i tried calva with vscode afterwards but it was basically the same thing, calva has paredit which overrides the keyboard navigation and there was no way to disable it. somebody had asked for the option to disable it on the github but the creator said something along the lines of calva without paredit wasn't the way he wanted it to be used, so i just picked another language to learn.

cospaia 2y ago
Wow. I'm the creator of Calva and I can tell you that I do not have an opinion on how to use it. I would never say something like that, and now I wonder what I could have said that was interpreted this way... By default Calva Paredit overrides three or so keyboard shortcuts. This is to help the users to not accidentally delete brackets, which in turn keeps the support questions down about broken Clojure code. I have tried to make it super easy to disable these overrides. There's a command for it. There's a button in the toolbar for it, and there's a setting for it. There's also a setting for removing all Paredit bindings, even those that are not overriding any default ones. (This setting is for people who use Paredit, but want to provide their own shortcuts entirely.)
- yungporko 2y ago
  i'm pretty sure this is the thread i saw, but at the time it hadn't been closed yet: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva-paredit/issues/10 https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva-paredit/issues/1... if there's now a way to disable paredit entirely then i might check it out again some time in the bear future

neilyio 2y ago

I'll second that the popular tooling, while powerful and reliable, its just not user friendly. The official Clojure CLI, for example, is just plain confusing, and that's most people's first impression to the entire ecosystem. The config files, while they use the wonderful `.edn` format, are also not intuitive. Newcomers are the most likely people to encounter the most amount of error messages... which are famously difficult to read. And that's before you even get into REPL configuration, which involves coordination with your editor process, a client process, and a server process. Even if you have a tool like Calva or CIDER managing it for you, you'll still get confused when something goes wrong unless you grok all the moving parts. Even if you figure that all out, you still don't have Parinfer or equivalents setup yet in your editor. Also, clojure-lsp tends to require some configuration to get working the way you want. And that's before you get started with ClojureScript, which brings the complexity to another level entirely. Despite all this, I love Clojure. It's an expert's language, even though it shouldn't have to be. Once you learn this stuff, you respect why much of this complexity exists. It's inherent to the amount of power the language gives you. But doesn't mean we can't make it easier to use and get started with.

roenxi 2y ago
> The official Clojure CLI, for example, is just plain confusing, and that's most people's first impression to the entire ecosystem. The config files, while they use the wonderful `.edn` format, are also not intuitive. I completely agree; it is unfortunate they don't spend more time officially recommending leiningen.org. A beginner attempting to use the built-in CLI is going to lead to a poor first 3 months.

astrashe2 2y ago

This matches my experience as an amateur programmer. The initial hill was steep, but I don't think it was because people weren't friendly. There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's sometimes easier to find correct answers for Clojure. Clojure itself is very clean and consistent, it's got a lot of polish to it, which makes it comparatively easy to learn. And there isn't that much of it. But for a long time the tooling was hard. That's far less of a problem than it used to be. deps.edn and shadow-cljs both made things easier, as has Cursive. People say nice things about Calva, but I don't know it. I'm a big fan. Babashka alone is enough to make learning Clojure worthwhile. Also, for someone like me, it's kind of nice that it feels almost finished. Once you learn it, you know it, and now that the tooling has settled down a bit you don't have to keep running to keep up.

hluska 2y ago
People posting the wrong information is a great opportunity for a community to explain why it’s wrong. We lost that take on community and it’s a major loss for our entire industry. It’s remarkably hard for people to figure out why they’re wrong when they’re wrong. I don’t think the solution is the Usenet-esque “you are wrong and your breeding is suspect” way. But there’s a very good place in the middle and I’d really like to find that place. Business wise, I think we’re using the wrong paradigm in some major places. Maybe we can beat that while I’m still alive and that would be a net win for our whole craft.