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OP here. I didn't realize that Clojure was a trigger word! I just included that bit at the beginning to give a little context on how I got into this topic, no

by Adrock 13y ago

OP here. I didn't realize that Clojure was a trigger word! I just included that bit at the beginning to give a little context on how I got into this topic, not to hype anything.

mrottenkolber 13y ago
No problem. I just fear that people overlook the serious CL.
- yogthos 13y ago
  In my opinion, the CL community is doing a fantastic job making sure that most people don't look at the language. Instead of being bitter that Clojure is getting all the attention, why not focusing on making CL more approachable. There seems to be a lot of disconnect between the CL community and the rest of the world. Any time pain points are brought up by beginners they're immediately brushed off in a rather derisive manner. For example, consider the fact that the only decent open source IDE for CL is Emacs. This will filter out majority of people out of the gate, since Emacs is notoriously difficult to learn and it feels archaic. I'm not arguing about merits of Emacs here, I'm just pointing out what it looks like to somebody who's not already invested in it. If you're going to be learning a really esoteric looking language, the last thing you want is to be learning a really weird IDE at the same time. You'd have to be pretty dedicated to continue in this situation. When the Light Table project got started, there was tons of animosity from Emacs users saying that it does nothing new and you could easily do all this in Emacs. That's great, except nobody bothered to do that with Emacs or package it into a beginner friendly experience. If somebody wanted to try Clojure, I'd just point them to download LT and they can get up and running literally within minutes. They can see all the joys of using the REPL, having code completion and all the basic features you'd expect out of the box. All of a sudden you can focus on learning the language and actually enjoy doing so. CL has been around for ages predating languages like Ruby and Python by a wide margin, and it does pretty much everything they do better. If the CL community actually bothered to make the initial experience palatable these languages might not even exist today. Instead, all the energy seems to be poured into shitting on other languages and feeling bitter that CL is not getting the attention it deserves.
maaku 13y ago
It's not, or at least it shouldn't be...

by Adrock 13y ago

OP here. I didn't realize that Clojure was a trigger word! I just included that bit at the beginning to give a little context on how I got into this topic, not to hype anything.

mrottenkolber 13y ago

No problem. I just fear that people overlook the serious CL.

yogthos 13y ago
In my opinion, the CL community is doing a fantastic job making sure that most people don't look at the language. Instead of being bitter that Clojure is getting all the attention, why not focusing on making CL more approachable. There seems to be a lot of disconnect between the CL community and the rest of the world. Any time pain points are brought up by beginners they're immediately brushed off in a rather derisive manner. For example, consider the fact that the only decent open source IDE for CL is Emacs. This will filter out majority of people out of the gate, since Emacs is notoriously difficult to learn and it feels archaic. I'm not arguing about merits of Emacs here, I'm just pointing out what it looks like to somebody who's not already invested in it. If you're going to be learning a really esoteric looking language, the last thing you want is to be learning a really weird IDE at the same time. You'd have to be pretty dedicated to continue in this situation. When the Light Table project got started, there was tons of animosity from Emacs users saying that it does nothing new and you could easily do all this in Emacs. That's great, except nobody bothered to do that with Emacs or package it into a beginner friendly experience. If somebody wanted to try Clojure, I'd just point them to download LT and they can get up and running literally within minutes. They can see all the joys of using the REPL, having code completion and all the basic features you'd expect out of the box. All of a sudden you can focus on learning the language and actually enjoy doing so. CL has been around for ages predating languages like Ruby and Python by a wide margin, and it does pretty much everything they do better. If the CL community actually bothered to make the initial experience palatable these languages might not even exist today. Instead, all the energy seems to be poured into shitting on other languages and feeling bitter that CL is not getting the attention it deserves.

maaku 13y ago

It's not, or at least it shouldn't be...