Good post! I have been going through the same problems myself. It
looks like enclojure is going to have a Netbeans 6.5 release very soon
(still alpha though). I've also tried to figure out the best way to
learn Clojure. After flailing about a bit, last night I printed out
all the documents on clojure.org's sidebar and read them in order.
They are very well written, but could be improved in the following
manner:
-Many more examples need to be peppered in and those examples need to
be well commented
-People without functional background probably need to be walked
through a few examples of map/reduce, functions returning functions
(and capturing variables in lexical scope), etc.
-Some visual aids would help differentiate the various reference types
(visual aid could just be a matrix that describes when to use which
ref type)
Scala's getting started guide explains its concurrency constructs in
the best way. They start with basic locks, create simple logic
variables out of them, expand those logical vars to more functionality
and layer on more and more complexity until they end up with actors.
All of this is done is bite-sized descriptions that build on simpler
examples.
Now that a few tutorials are starting to appear, I think they need to
focus on Clojure's interesting features. It makes sense to describe s-
expressions, ways of doing simple arithmetic, printing hello world
messages. However, there need to be examples of re-defining functions
on the fly, simple examples of programs generating programs (genetic
programming), making best use of multiple cores, etc.
Tutorial writers also need to be mindful of the fact that reader
macros need to be used with care (for introductory tutorials that
is). Functions are often named in a self-explanatory manner and
readers know that they have to carefully parse s-exprs to get
comfortable. However, seeing ^{blah}, #{blah} or '(blah blah)
without reminding readers of what these symbols mean makes learning
clojure a little frustrating (true with any other language). In other
words, don't worry about repeating yourself.
By the way, these are not complaints. Just some helpful hints from a
newbie :)
On Dec 17, 6:24 pm, Mibu <mibu.cloj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I recommended clojure to a dozen friends or so and after a while none
> of them stuck with it. I know clojure being a lisp and being at the
> current development stage is not for everyone, but after I probed why
> people gave up with it I saw the barriers to entry were largely
> superficial and can be easily solved with some clarifications:
>
...
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