Hacker News Reader

Comment by penpapersw | Hacker News Reader

Having written Clojure full-time for the past 5 years while writing cleancoders.com has really spoiled me. Clojure's introspective nature makes for some amazingly fast productivity because you can hook up your IDE to the REPL and have a kind of super-REPL, which can really speed up development a ton if you design your system it right. I'm not sure if this project can keep that aspect because of how it compiles to C++. But if it does, then it could really be invaluable in the Clojure ecosystem.

View on HN

Author here. If I am not mistaken (I don't do web development.) very early versions of ClojureScript repl compiled code on the JVM side then piped the output to the browser. (Maybe it still does idk) I am thinking of doing something similar using Cling[1]. Ferret can compile and pipe output to Cling and use Cling as the repl.

[1] https://root.cern.ch/cling

Curious what IDE you have set up to do the REPL driven development you mentioned? I'm just starting out in learning Clojure and am finding various options out there with vigorous proponents of each. I am wondering what someone's real-world experience is after 5 years.

It's hard sometimes to find the editors/IDEs that might suite one particularly well since the vast community is attached to a given platform.

The most mature Clojure development environments right now are Spacemacs/Emacs with CIDER (free) and IntelliJ IDEA with the Cursive plugin (commercial, but inexpensive). Both are excellent.

I'd also add that support in Vim and Neovim are also very good.

Cursive is a very mature project nowadays. I'm surprised at how advanced it is considering how dynamic Clojure is.

Emacs + CIDER. It's extraordinarily fast, if you're willing to get used to Emacs :)

I use IntelliJ with Cursive, I have had to do zero configuration, it just works with lein projects.

I will eventually switch to Spacemacs and CIDER once I've really honed my Clojure skills, but for starting out Cursive was what allowed me to learn Clojure in the first place.

So far I've used vim, neovim, cursive and spacemacs and all have solid repl integration. I am generally a vim/neovim user and have been using that for years. It's good. Recently, I've been using spacemacs and like it better. Cursive is pretty solid too though if you're an IntelliJ user.

I would also like to plug Vim. I use it for both Clojure and C++ development, and it handles both like a champ.

Try Atom, following this admittedly opinionated guide. I think you might find it more accessible unless you're already familiar with one of the other alternatives.

https://gist.github.com/jasongilman/d1f70507bed021b48625

The only thing I would add is to try out smart mode in the printer package.

There's a mooc on smalltalk on FUN. You should try it. You'll probably have a blast too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com