The lack of a debugger seriously hindered my development process in the beginning. You should look into the IntelliJ plugin. It's very well done, and debugging works flawlessly out of the box. It's sped up my productivity by a factor of three at the very least.
I have given Emacs+Slime a fair chance I'd say, but after working with it for four months now, a nice modern IDE like IntelliJ is still what I'm used to and I get more work done in it, and I suspect it will be like that for a majority of Clojure users. As for workflow, mine doesn't differ significantly from everyone else's. There is one technique that is a significant productivity gain and which is far easier in Clojure than in other languages though. I separate out my program into segments, and during development, I make sure to keep each segment independent. eg. For programming a simple 2d game. I can divide the program into the GraphicsEngine segment, and the GameLogic segment. The GraphicsEngine segment will handle all the lowlevel details of drawing, and the GameLogic segment will handle game specific code. So, I will program the GraphicsEngine segment first, and usually just do some quick testing in the REPL to make sure it's working. Then I will program the GameLogic segment. Now, in the final product, the GameLogic segment will be dependent on the GraphicsEngine segment. The GameLogic segment will call the appropriate functions to draw sprites when it needs to, etc... BUT during development I make sure not to mix the two. So instead of directly calling GraphicsEngine, I'll create a simplified dummy GraphicsEngine interface. This interface will usually just print statements. ie. I will create the dummy function: drawOval() which will just print "an oval was drawn at coordinate (0, 1) with size 5", instead of actually drawing an oval to the screen. I then use this dummy interface to program and test the GameLogic segment. When everything's done, I can meld the two program halves together relatively painlessly. The advantages this approach has is: 1) You can be fairly confident that there aren't any bugs in your Dummy Interface. 2) Because of that, any bugs you find while programming GameLogic will in fact reside in GameLogic. So you don't need to bounce around different parts of your program to trace bugs. 3) Because the dummy interface is simple, you can keep it all in your head while you program GameLogic. You don't need to jump other parts of your program to check up function definitions, etc... 4) It's great for debugging, because now you have a printout of all your program actions. Which you can save, review, etc... And Clojure is great for this style because there's no type system to get in the way. To do this in Java requires a significantly more careful plan so satisfy the type system, and often the effort that goes into that plan outweighs the benefit. I wonder if anyone else programs in this fashion. -Patrick --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
