On 29 June 2010 23:03, Brian Hurt <bhur...@gmail.com> wrote: > No. This discussion is/was about (non-specific) changes being proposed to > Clojure.
Care to quote any message from this thread where any changes to Clojure were being proposed...? I have to say I cannot find one. I will take this opportunity to note that while I have no problem with someone not caring to make the Clojure setup experience -- I repeat, "Clojure setup experience", not "Clojure-the-language experience" -- easier for those new to the JVM (and possibly other elements of the setting-up-Clojure puzzle), I cannot fathom why anyone would take issue with others feeling differently. Nobody is forcing anybody to provide easier-to-use tooling; if you feel no desire to help, that is fine. The probability of any of the other goals behind Clojure suffering because of someone providing a simple Clojure-in-a-box package seems extremely diminutive to me. So -- what is the actual problem...? On 29 June 2010 08:19, Tim Daly <d...@axiom-developer.org> wrote: > Nothing about lisp is particularly difficult. > Pandoric macros, closures, continuations, > reader tables, circular structures, lexical > vs dynamic scoping, indefinite lifetimes, > quasiquoted expressions, or any of the other > simple ideas. I happen to have learned most of the above concepts from SICP, which provided an absolutely fantastic learning experience. Not knowing about many of those concepts (and knowing little about the others), to me, simply meant that I was in a good position to *start learning about them*. Oh, by the way, I used GNU/MIT Scheme & Edwin while going through the book, with no setup problems that I can recall *at all*, which I still think was great; and the fact that the language being used had just about no syntax and could basically be picked up from its use was a great boon to me. I won't argue one way or the other about my lack of preconceptions from 10y+ of Java experience playing a part here... (Well, strictly speaking, I used Vim as the main editor most of the time, but I liked REPLing and applying minor corrections in Edwin and could have done fine with just Edwin with just the amount of prior Emacs experience that is afforded by going through the tutorial once, out of curiosity, a while earlier; Edwin includes the same tutorial and there is really no REPL setup involved.) It occurs to me that the following quote from "Essential pre-reading for life with LFS" [1] will be appropriate in this context: > You need to be fluent in using bash, this is a good tutorial: > > http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html > > (Yes, I know it says 'Advanced', but read it anyway, do you want > to be a newbie forever?) Not everyone wants to be a CS newbie forever and for those who do not, abstracting away some of the tedium of setting up build / editing / whatever tools could be helpful (not necessarily because it makes things *easier*, but rather because it makes it possible to focus on the exciting new body of knowledge and not the mundane configuration minutiae providing about the same sense of accomplishment as setting the clock on a VCR). Note that all of the above applies to (more or less) experienced programmers who want to try out new concepts through Clojure; perhaps they will need an open mind to succeed, but displaying that is up to them, while possibly making the initial experience manageable would be up to us. If you don't want to help, that's fine, but please let go of the astonishing claim that there is no point. ...as you can see, I am firmly in the "Lisp is great for education" camp. :-) All the best, Michał [1] http://lfs.phayoune.org/hints/downloads/files/OLD/prereading.txt -- 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
