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Comment by verisimilidude | Hacker News Reader

Most of my Clojure WTFs were not related to the language itself, but rather the tooling. This was years ago, but everyone used to say, "Before diving into Clojure, you should really learn emacs and all these other things first." I'm glad I ignored them and sputtered along in a text editor while learning the basics of the language, because I would've otherwise burnt out.

With apps like Light Table now available, maybe beginners have an easier ramp these days.

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I never got into Emacs myself, I started with Eclipse and then moved to Cursive (https://cursiveclojure.com/) which I simply can't recommend enough, I also use Light Table for some of my smaller projects.

The fact that you don't have to use Emacs to work with Clojure is a huge benefit in my opinion. Emacs takes a lot of investment to learn and use effectively, and not everybody has the time, nor the inclination to do that.

Good to know! I started with emacs, but decided to use Light Table for now. Nothing against emacs, but I don't want to make things harder by learning a new language and a new editor at the same time. Aside from Light Table (and presumably Leiningen) do you have any other tooling recommendations?

I chose to learn both at the same time, and would recommend it if you're willing to buckle down for a month or two of frustration. I really feel like I further developed my ability to go head first into learning in a way I had in the past. Still learning a lot though about both. I should mention that I'm a freelancer; if I was an employee it might be hard to get a way with spending so much time learning rather than producing in the short-term.

I will say that cider has done a very nice job of getting interactive development using Emacs to work well. I am a 20+ year Emacs user and love working with Clojure via cider. I will say that I think getting started with Light Table is a great way to start, but don't leave Emacs too far behind!

Good luck go you!

I also am a long time emacs user, but whenever a plugin freezes emacs I immediately stop using it. Is is cider now stable? I know nrepl.el would crash emacs frequently if you asked it to evaluate the wrong thing.

I'm not sure how long this feature has been around, but C-c C-b will abort any running evaluation(s)... I've used it more than once to save a non-responsive cider repl session.

Well I've been using cider / nrepl.el for a long time and never knew this. Don't know how I missed it.

Thank you.

I've never had cider or the old nrepl.el crash or freeze on me, they've always worked fine. I develop on Mac OSX and Linux, what platform are you on? And what Emacs version? I tend to be on the latest GNU releases. Are you using a GNU Emacs or something else? If you're on Mac, I highly recommend this distribution [1]

[1] -- http://emacsformacosx.com

I'm on the latest release of GNU emacs. I'm mostly on Windows, which could be the issue.

I use Emacs on Windows too, but I don't develop there, it's mostly a glorified notepad for initial analysis of log files, so I can't really help there. I would recommend getting melpa setup on your emacs and keep cider as up-to-date as possible to see if that helps, assuming you're not doing that already either via melpa or directly from source.

Good luck to you!

For emacs/clojure users I highly recommend Sam Aaron's Emacs Live. It is an "opinionated" emacs setup and while some of the opinions might not be to your liking, it is really easy to set up and get going with clojure using it.

I really like IntelliJ with cursive:

https://cursiveclojure.com/userguide/

Definitely recommend people try Cursive Clojure, the clojure Intellij plugin. Much easier to use/setup than emacs IMHO. Lots of clojure people have been switching.

Nicer debugging experience too.

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