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Comment by ryanseys | Hacker News Reader

The only way it seems you can be effective with Java is with an IDE to do most of the heavy lifting. What would be better is if Java shipped with more focused command-line tools and better defaults that allow me to productive immediately without the need to learn something as hefty as IntelliJ / Eclipse. This could lessen the barrier of entry to Java and widen community adoption.

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The command-line tools are fine. And Java is the most adopted language in existence.

The problem with writing Java without an IDE isn't one of tooling, it's that the language is so very verbose. They're working on that with lambdas and generics inference, but there's a limit to what you can do and remain backwards compatible.

Or you could just use modern JVM languages like Clojure.

Lisp? Lisp syntax makes less sense than lambda and stream which have ruined Java.

I like Clojure, but anyway to make it start faster in a scripting context? I wrote the same script in Clojure and Kotlin, and the Kotlin one loads so much faster.

There's Planck for OS X https://github.com/mfikes/planck

It uses JavaScriptCore and starts practically instantly. There's some work being done to port it to Linux/Windows as well.

Here's an example:

cat foo.cljs

#!/usr/local/bin/planck

(println "hello world: clojurescript -> planck -> as shell script")

./foo.cljs

hello world: clojurescript -> planck -> as shell script

Planck can be installed using homebrew now as well.

Another promising option is Pixie https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie

Cheers mate :)

What would you use instead of an IDE? Learning Intellij is a lot easier than learning Vim or Emacs.

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