Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6thaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Great question as I'm trying to make that decision myself. I love Lisp in general and the JVM is great and ubiquitous, so Clojure seems good. The reality is that every time I try to learn it, I get stuck learning leinegen, Emacs...etc, which is more than I have to deal with when using Python, so I skip it. Also, it seems like you get a .jar file and have to run it in conjunction with something like "Java -jar clojurefile.clj". I know that isn't too bad, but once I installed F#, I just put the compiler "fsc.exe" and the REPL/interpreter "fsi.exe" in my path and it is pretty simple now. I normally have an fsi window open for testing and write my full code in Notepad++ and then feed that to fsc.exe when I'm done and I get a little executable that is ~5kb. As long as a coworker has the .net runtime on their computer I can give that to them no problem. I'm sure Clojure can do something similar, but as I'm not a Java/JVM person I have no clue how.

View on HN

For learning Clojure, I highly recommend Oakes' Nightcode Editor/IDE. It integrates Leiningen and Boot, and has everything ready to just code and push "run".

It also intigrates Shaun's awesome Parinfer parentheses management system, which adjusts your parentheses according to your indentation. Think Python rules: Put a thing inside another thing by just tabbing it over.

Thanks! I have the same feeling - the ecosystem with F# feels more robust and production ready. But it might be just because I've never been a Java guy and the things that seem obscure to me in Clojure are trivial to Java people.

I think both are very production worthy as far as reliable code running in production.

Check out the success stories on the Clojure site. One of the biggest ones to me is Walmart using it for Black Friday e-commerce. That is a good indicator to me. They've had good success stories with F# as well, but C# uses F# as a research language and the best bits are kind of bolted back onto C#. It keeps C# as less painful than Java, so less devs make the jump. Honestly, the future for both languages isn't 100% secure. I just wish both languages got more love.

I'm in the same boat as you. Clojure seems to really be meant for someone who already has a few years of Java experience. There are plenty of examples where someone dips into Java and I'm totally lost.

You don't actually need to know anything about Java to be productive in Clojure. At least that was my own experience.

I've been told that before and respect your experience even if it is very different than mine.

Let's talk about writing code in Python. You write a script and either run it through your IDE or via the command line via Python pythonscript.py. With D, I write some code and feed it through the compiler like dmd scriptname.d.

With Clojure in addition to all the cruft I have to learn (Emacs, leinegen...etc), I still have to know something of Java. One of the big selling points is integration. If I know zero Java, how am I supposed to make use of the various classes? Even if I largely stick to just Clojure, how does one interpret the Java stack traces? What is the best method for running via the JVM? How do I performance tune the JVM? How do I use GUI frameworks that are largely all OO Java?

You can run Clojure without Leiningen and you definitely do not need to learn emacs. I use vim, but Cursive (IntelliJ plugin) is IMHO the most beginner friendly option available (other good options include Nightlight, Atom with clojure olugin, VS Code with plugin). You can run Clojure without learning Leiningen with many of these too.

How does one not use leiningen? Do you just substitute lein for the other build tool provided by cognitect? All the tutorials I've seen have you jack-in to a lein REPL. I guess I could just use the jar file from the download directly as my REPL? I wish more tutorials started that way so I could learn without all the tools that I don't need at this point.

Thanks for helping point this out. Cursive has a trial license and is pretty cheap, but it is still annoying to get a license to something you might not need in my organization if others aren't already using it (probably easier to get visual studio for over $1k than $100 cursive license). VS Code asked me for the leiningen REPL path and I just gave up at that point for the night. I wish the Clojure download zip came with a very simple IDE like Dr. Racket or the GroovyConsole with line wrap, parenthesis matching/highlighting and a pane for the file and REPL and some pre- loaded tutorials. I would have no excuses.

If don't like or do not want InteliJ with Cursive or vanilla Emacs or VSCode, you can still use Vim, Eclipse, Atom, Spacemacs. The days when Clojure could be used only in Emacs are long gone.

Here are instructions for running clojure directly: JVM, Clojure.jar and nothing else:

https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started#_other_ways_to_ru...

You can also use boot, or if you’re using clojurescript, there are other non-leiningen options too. But really, leiningen is easy — you only need to know where in the project file to put dependencies (if you’ve ever used any other build tool, you can do this) and then run `lein repl` or `lein run` or `lein test` and to package a jar: `lein uberjar`. You don’t need to know anything else to get started.

Cursive is free for non-commercial use. If you just want a simple editor to get started, check out Nightcode or Nightlight.

https://sekao.net/nightcode/

https://sekao.net/nightlight/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com