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Comment by dopamean | Hacker News Reader

Yup, new to Lisp and JVM. All of my experience, brief as it has been, is in Ruby. I've only taken a cursory glance at the book I purchased and frankly I think I'll be ok picking up Clojure. It just may require a lot of focus. Is Emacs the typical editor Clojuristas use? I use vim though I have recently switched to Sublime.

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I use emacs for anything with S-expressions and vim for everything else, but you should be careful with information overload. It's very easy to get started with LightTable if you want to play with Clojure, so I'd recommend that approach to work through book examples.

If you're new to Lisp, I'd recommend working through Land of Lisp [1], and pg's On Lisp [2] in order. They're both Common Lisp books, but they will introduce you to and expand your mind on (respectively) what's possible with all the power Lisp gives you. Virtually everything you learn in those books will be very nice tools to have in your toolbox as a Clojure dev.

As for the best starting Clojure book, Clojure Programming [3] is excellent. It has great OOP -> FP examples, is fairly extensive and well-written.

[1] http://landoflisp.com [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html [3] http://www.clojurebook.com

https://github.com/tpope/vim-fireplace is where it's at for vim/clojure tools.

I've heard good things about using emacs-live (https://github.com/overtone/emacs-live) to get you up and running quickly.

+1 for emacs live

Vim can work very well with Clojure (I use it). Look into ScreenSend, which lets you send code from the editor to a repl. You can use it with Python as well, and anything with interactive evaluation. You might also want to install paredit, which keeps your parentheses sorted out for you.

Correction, you must install paredit (and spend half a day familiarizing yourself with how it works). It'll make your learning experience 10x easier.

As for Emacs vs Vim, I also use Vim for Clojure development. There's definitely a bias toward Emacs in the community, but that doesn't mean that you have to go with Emacs. In fact, there are now useful plugins/packages to work with Clojure in Vim, Sublime, IntelliJ, Eclipse, as well as Emacs. There's even two editors written in Clojure itself: Clooj (https://github.com/arthuredelstein/clooj) and the afore-linked LightTable.

(> smartparens paredit) ;; true

https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens

Correction, you must install paredit

Or the newer Smartparens: https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens/wiki

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