Comment by Royalaid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Royalaid | Hacker News Reader

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While we can suggest Cider as an option, I have had nontrivial problems with breakage on updating, Emacs falling over with long lines of text, Windows support, etc. I also know that I am not the only one who has had these problems https://twitter.com/ztellman/status/1055152840589496320.

These kinds of issues a part of the tooling gap and are real reasons people give up on Clojure and I do find the dismissive attitude of most when I have suggested this in the past off putting.

Addressing Emacs specifically, while it would be probably worth the investment it is not an answer most people want to hear and when we suggest that Clojure is this great thing it is important to show people on some of their terms because learning a new editor on top of Clojure more then we should be asking IMHO and for all the talk of Clojure being pragmatic this feels directly opposed to that ethos.

Let me emphasize, I don't want to say anyone is doing anything wrong or that Emacs isn't the right way forward but it had to be acknowledged that there are real problems that path that need improvement when it comes to onboarding new developers and with daily use.

In 6 years that I've been using Cider daily, I don't remember it being broken after update. Ditto for Emacs.

A few times Cider had major changes, but even then it was quickly resolved, and was relevant only to people that were using daily snapshots. I guess if someone is a beginner, they'd use a stable version, and these are rather stable.

Big files could be problematic in Emacs. OTOH, Clojure files are never big.

As for Emacs requiring a bit of learning at first. Well, yes. It has lots of features that beginners have probably never encountered in other tools. These features are awesome. They also help a lot. So, someone expects to unlock a great featureset, but refuses to spend even a few afternoons learning about that featureset. I understand that people would rather get something out of nothing, but it's not Emacs's fault.

Part of the problem could have been that I was using Spacemacs and package support and that may have broken it but circling back around this connects with meeting people halfway, I don't want to learn Emacs style control, I know Vim, Vim works elsewhere, and I just want to write Clojure. I can do that now with Cursive so the trade off isn't worth it. A lot of people learning feel and think this way in my experience, especially if I selling Clojure to someone who is reluctant, anecdotally at least 4 people I know have followed this path, I am sure it extends beyond them.

Per the big files, its not so much Clojure but output at the REPL. Especially as a noob accidentally grabbing way to much data for a buffer is really easy, Emacs hangs, REPL and process dies and has to be rebooted and you have to bring up everything again. This is non-trivial friction when learning and should really be handled gracefully by the editor.

As for everything else regarding Emacs and learning all these points stand and are valid but still don't address the problem of someone wanting to learn Clojure and instead having to learn Emacs + Clojure + Cider. For someone just starting on the path most won't have more than 3 files of CLJ and may not even interact with Lein or Deps. Refactoring IS important but not to them. I just don't think the trade off is worth it for someone just toying around with CLJ in their free time. It may not be the best metric but "time to hello world" and "time to blog" matter to people coming in because it shows that the promise that they are sold is something that they can reach and achieve.

Hm, I use Spacemacs particularly because of the easy config.

That said, you're right: you should just be able to use vim, and historically CIDER has been the dominant (most polished) environment. At Clojurists Together Foundation, we're trying to fix that though: a lot of our funding has gone towards IDE development including for vim. Some of it towards CIDER also benefits vim because they share internals.

[0]: https://clojuriststogheter.org

It's worth mentioning that BBatsov, the creator of CIDER, maintains a practically zero-config Emacs distribution, Prelude. A novice interested in Clojure could install Prelude, and start coding Clojure and other popular languages using pre-configured packages in, let's say, 15-30 minutes. The difference from Spacemacs is that Prelude is much simpler, does not mess with Emacs defaults, is close to vanilla Emacs, and has been super stable for years.

http://batsov.com/prelude/

aaand I guess that's what ppl mean by "ergonomics issues". Emacs is very stable, quite logical in some sense, but also hasn't kept up with the times and doesn't default to those typical keyboard shortcuts, which most newer editors almost all share... but this has been discussed countless times before on twitter, clojureverse.org etc...

My bet would be that you are working with the Linux version of Emacs. That's indeed a lot less problematic and more performant too. Under macOS and Windows, the situation is not that rosy and since ppl want familiarity, they typically mix in something like Spacemacs, Doom Emacs, etc into the mixture. For a long time they would probably won't even hear about Prelude or if they do, they would not even assume that's a preset system for Emacs. I've seen this happening to a couple of ppl already just in the past 2-3 years.

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