To add the perspective of a true newbie to this dogpile, I'm going to have to say that the OP was just plain wrong. He made a major mistake -- wanting to compile clojure for himself on a platform that's not exactly friendly to Java development in the first place (Slackware, not Linux in general) -- and promptly blamed that on the wrong tool.
Are there some barriers to entry for a newbie? Hell, yes. I, for example, can't stand EMACS (insert the "great OS with crappy editor" gag here), so the EMACS-centric nature of the tools currently available is definitely a downer, as is the community assumption that anybody who'd want to use clojure is OBVIOUSLY an EMACS user. That's OK, though. On the Java side the assumption is that everybody uses Eclipse and I hate that more than I hate EMACS. This hasn't stopped me from using Java when I've needed to. Another, slightly worse, problem is that Clojure is a moving target. I have the book *Programming Clojure* and have noted already that the language is changing out from underfoot. If I'm not careful I suspect that in a years' time what I "know" about Clojure will be out of date or quite possibly even flatly wrong. This is a more serious problem than "I don't get JAR files" like the OP had, especially since there doesn't seem to be a coherent resource anywhere describing the changes -- lots of work is being put into changes but not so much is being put into *communicating* those changes. (Insert the usual round of people utterly missing the point by linking to blog X here and blog Y here and blog Z here talking about the changes.) Again I don't think this is a major problem, though. Clojure is a young language and at this early stage in its development it's inevitable that there will be large changes (as theory hits the real world). Further, anybody who's been in the industry for as long as the OP has claimed to have been knows full well that documentation *always* lags behind development. I think it telling that he's pointing to mature (and, in the case of Rebol, beyond end-of-life) products to show how documentation "should be done". It indicates to me that he's not got a lot of experience with new programming environments. TL;DR summary: this newbie thinks that yes, there are a few barriers to entry for new Clojure users but they're nowhere near as serious as the OP claims they are and are not even unusually bad for what is normal in this industry. -- "Perhaps people don't believe this, but throughout all of the discussions of entering China our focus has really been what's best for the Chinese people. It's not been about our revenue or profit or whatnot." --Sergey Brin, demonstrating the emptiness of the "don't be evil" mantra. -- 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 Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. 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 To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
