On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 2:26 PM, cageface <milese...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As I said in the HN thread, I think you're right that getting started > with a productive clojure environment is harder than it has to be. > > However, as I also said in the thread, I think the *real* obstacles > for a noobie are the concepts in the language itself. Clojure is very > elegantly designed, but it builds on some very powerful and somewhat > difficult concepts. Stuart's book is a big help here but I'm afraid > that Clojure is simply over the heads of a lot of "noobs" anyway. > > So I wonder how much making the first few baby steps easier is really > going to help the uptake of Clojure. I have to imagine that the kind > of person that can't figure out a CLASSPATH is going to have his head > explode when he has to figure out how to restructure all his > iterations in terms of loop/recur. > > This is the question I had on the blog post- what is meant by a "newbie"? Specifically, what sort of newbie is Clojure wanting to attract? One of the "complaints" the original poster had was that you had a choice of editors. Of the pool of potential Clojure users, how many of them are not already familiar with one (or more) of vi, emacs, or eclipse/other Java IDE? If not 0, then it surely must be very small. That you can adopt Clojure without having to learn a new editor is a huge plus in my book (if I have to use your development environment to learn your language, I'm highly unlikely to learn your language). One of Clojure's biggest strengths, IMHO, is the ease of adoption in situations where a Java tool chain already exists. A lot of the complaints he has stand in opposition to this. For example, the plethora of different build tools that can be used. Or that Clojure is just a library, and all you need to do is deploy a couple of extra jars to deploy Clojure code. Given a choice between Clojure being adopted by newbies who are so new they don't even have a familiar development environment, or existing Java development environments, I'd vote for the second. Brian -- 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
