Hacker News Reader

Comment by andykx | Hacker News Reader

I love Clojure, but I felt like 90% of the time it took me to “learn” Clojure was spent actually learning how to use emacs and working with a REPL. Once you get it down, it’s easy to be super productive, though.

View on HN

I tried learning emacs when learning Clojure, but found IntelliJ with the Cursive plugin to be a much superior experience (the static analysis is awesome). Been writing Clojure for 3 years now (2 years professionally) and I still prefer Cursive to the alternatives, e.g. Atom, Vscode + Calva, emacs. I would say that most of my colleagues with their custom emacs setups still don't have as a good of a development environment as the vanilla experience in Cursive.

I also use parinfer (https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/) rather than paredit, which makes editing Clojure a bit like editing Python. Rather than memorising commands for structural editing, you instead adjust the whitespace using tab/space/delete and the parens reorder themselves accordingly. You can still use paredit commands while having parinfer enabled, but I rarely have a need to.

I fells for the same trap and I would caution any readers considering learning Clojure, that do not already know Emacs, to not fall for the same trap. It sets you up for a harder road and increases the chance of failing to achieve your goal. Just use Cursive or Visual Studio Code with the Calva extension and leave Emacs for a later date if that is a goal.

Parinfer + Cursive is my strategy too, and I describe it the same way (Pythonish).

This is definitely the least intimidating strategy for ecosystem newcomers.

Would try this...

For folks who don't know emacs, I think it's wise to advise most people to focus on learning one thing and learning one thing well. Emacs is huge and learning it can distract from learning clojure. There is Cursive for Intellij IDEA (my personal tool), Atom plugins (the platform I learned clojure on), Visual Studio Code plugins, even vim plugins. But if you're already a vim user, I recommend Spacemacs as it is well documented and works great with clojure with a next to no configuration out of the box.

Spacemacs is great, just use the dev branch (I think) instead of master.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com