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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

IIUC Rich Hickey probably did just that too, writing ad-hoc version of clojure semantics in cpp before making his own language enforcing this.

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I recall he was big into SBCL, but most IT organizations wanted all code to run on the JVM or CLR. So he had to make a Lisp to run on the JVM and Armed Bear Common Lisp apparently wasn't exactly what he wanted.

I want to learn Clojure, but there are definitely some road blocks. I don't have the time for Emacs, it'd be a pain to get a Cursive license (although the cost is extremely reasonable I'd have to do paperwork at work), and I don't know the JVM or Java well.

Visual Studio Code, Atom and Vim also have great Clojure support. (edit: might be worth to add editors and IDEs to the Clojure landing page to illustrate that there are many solid options by now)

With ClojureScript you can leverage JavaScript runtimes like browsers.

The ClojureScript testsuite also passes using the recently released hermes runtime (https://twitter.com/mfikes/status/1149360258994847745)

edit: Just wanted to add that being familiar with Java or the JVM isn't necessary to get into Clojure. It definitely is not a prerequisite :)

I'll have to check out the Atom and VSCode options. Thanks for the heads up. Basically all I need is paredit, some basic intellisense, and be able to see the project heirachy.

I like the idea of Clojurescript, but don't currently have any reason to do web development.

If that's all you need, I think Nightcode will do: https://sekao.net/nightcode/

It's a simple Clojure IDE written in Clojure.

If you're learning Clojure then you can use cursive for free until you go commercial with it?

I believe there is a limited trial yes, but corporate IT always has hoops to go through

In addition to the editors others have suggested, I've been quite happy writing Clojure in Sublime Text. In ST, you might want the lispindent and paredit plugins on top of the main Clojure plugin.

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