Hacker News Reader

Comment by masomenos | Hacker News Reader

You piqued my curiosity, never having tried Clojure.

My time from 0 to getting (the correct!) result of (+2 2) from Clojure's REPL was approximately 60 seconds.

Pretty simple.

It took you less than 60 seconds to install Java, compile Clojure, and start the REPL? :) I haven't actually used (or installed) Clojure, but most of the complaints (here and on proggit) appear to be by people who don't already know Java, and so have to figure out enough of the Java build process to build Clojure in the first place, even though a touted advantage of Clojure is that you don't have to deal with Java.

I have no java (programming) experience, and it took me ~45 s:

#apt-get install closure

#closure

user=> (+ 2 2)

Most of that 45 s was waiting for apt-get.

Now it's not going to be this easy on platforms that don't have such nice package management (e.g. Windows). Furthermore, Raphael_Amiard makes a good point that there's a lot more infrastructure that has to go into web application development (or any other kind of application development, for that matter) than computing the sum of 2 and 2.

Nonetheless, it just doesn't seem that hard. At worst, put a "clojure /path/to/project.lisp" in rc.local or equivalent.

(Caveat: my web development experience consists entirely of a couple of toy projects I ran on my laptop for my own amusement. Take all this with a grain of salt.)

EDITed for formatting.

There is _no_ cloJure package, neither on debian, neither on ubuntu repos, and it's called clojure, not closure, so either you are full of shit, either you installed closure common lisp, either you have non standart repos. This is a scary example of how a post can be upvoted when _nobody_ in presence understands what they are talking about.

http://bit.ly/bbzeYP

and

http://bit.ly/bB1sVG

You could use those.

The problem isn't that it's hard to get at the REPL (it's not) - it's envisioning how to use Clojure to do a full-scale web project. What's the workflow?

Using Clojure actually isn't that hard. It is basically the same amount of difficulty as any other compiled language. You can basically take any text editor and do a standard 'write->compile->run'. However, most people that are familiar with Lisp, prefer a more interactive development environment that allows you to make changes to a running app. Probably the most powerful environment for doing this is SLIME in Emacs. As a result this is what is mentioned the most. I think this tends to scare people off.

I don't know why the Enclojure plugin for Netbeans isn't mentioned more. It provides an interactive development environment for Clojure in package that is much easier to digest for anyone who is familiar with an IDE.

Just as easy for Windows. Use clojurebox. Double click the .exe file.

http://clojure.bighugh.com/

Probably already had a JRE installed (just about everybody does, I would expect), downloaded a pre-compiled clojure.jar, and ran it.

The advantage should be more properly stated that you don't have to deal with Java the language, but you still get Java the ecosystem. Using all of the supporting build & deployment stuff is actually seen as advantage with experienced Clojure guys.

well i was more speaking of setting up clojure in a web development way, meaning, starting automatically your jetty server and website at the machine boot, which is pretty much a given if you use a LAMP setup.

Also you don't code a website from a REPL, you need a proper developpement environnement, some way to manage your website dependencies, etc.. well, theses issues have been covered in lengths these last days, in a few articles, and the clojure people are well aware of it, and working on it, but for having done a serious website in clojure , let me say it's nowhere as automated or simple as setting up a LAMP server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com