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I really don't see the advantage of trying to sell clojure and emacs as a package, it just alienates a lot of potential newcomers. Sadly almost every Clojure tutorial I've seen so far does this.

Most tutorials for other programming languages simply go with a text editor of your choice + a console repl.

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Agreed, learning Emacs while learning Clojure is just a bad idea. It's a huge distraction and it ties the success of learning Clojure into the success of learning Emacs (which will never be everyone's thing) and reduces your speed while learning.

If you really want to evaluate stuff inline and get a more LISPian experience, use LightTable, not Emacs. But even then, I'd recommend against that. Use what you know.

You said it better than me.

If you look at the rest of the posts on howistart.org you'll see that each mentions in some way the authors development environment of choice. This is on purpose, howistart is meant to be opinionated and show how the author works, not attempt to be generic.

I'll second this; there's a huge amount of value to be gained by reading opinionated pieces from experienced software developers. Many times it's just inspiration in the form of "huh that's cool, I wonder how I can integrate that feature/technique into my own workflow ..." I think that's also part of the appeal of watching other programmers livestream, though unfortunately there the signal to noise ratio is so much lower there than a well written article.

Well... I may be biased as one of those folks who uses both vim and emacs, but: there is a big (positive) difference in my opinion between evaluating code in-line, right from your source file, in your editor, than copy+pasting it into a REPL somewhere. Loading up your ns in cider and then being able to evaluate functions, edit them, and see their output right in emacs is terrifically powerful. Even in SublimeText or IntelliJ or something you have to wrap the function in question in a print statement to do that, sometimes affecting lexical scope, etc.

No, you don't - in Cursive (in IntelliJ) you have always been able to send forms directly to the REPL from your editor. I think all good Clojure environments allow this.

I'm an ex-Clojurian using Haskell, and my time spent in console REPL vs. Emacs Haskell REPL is pretty evenly split.

I'm was quite grateful the terminal REPL (ghci) is better than `lein repl`. Which I use (Emacs vs. term) in what circumstance depends in part on how long I'm going to be heads down on the problem I'm working on.

Well, the series is titled "How I start" after all. It's not "How you might want to get your feet wet" -- it's "How I, that actually have used X in anger, get stuff done". That doesn't mean your point isn't valid, but I think showing off how the author actually works makes sense in this context.

>I really don't see the advantage of trying to sell clojure and emacs as a package

Because Emacs is the best Lisp editing environment, hands down.

Depends on the lisp.

Lots of people disagree on that point, of course.

Huh? That was the first thing about it that caught my interest!

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