I am a newcomer to the language, and to lisps in general, and having to interpret Clojure's stacktraces is really hard. It is one of those things that made me not want to use the language at all. It also makes it hard for me to recommend the language to others.
It is not just the stacktraces, but also the error messages. For beginners they really are a kick in the face: "you have absolutely no idea of what you are doing, do you??". This extremely simple (and easy to debug :) ) example, shows my point I think: user=> (1) java.lang.ClassCastException: java.lang.Integer cannot be cast to clojure.lang.IFn (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0) How about at least hinting a little bit about what is wrong here? Trivial example yes, but when you get this, or something similar, inside a 50 line Clojure script, and it does not tell you where or why, it can be a bit frustrating. Clojure has steep learning curve, at least for a Java developer, and these problems make it difficult to do the effort of really getting to know the language. This is actually my main complaint about Clojure. I have no knowledge about clj-stacktrace, but I would welcome anything that makes it easier for beginners to get started. Anyhow, thanks for a great language and a great community. Having gotten through the initial shock, I am really starting to enjoy programming in Clojure. Cheers, - Alf On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 06:55, Phil Hagelberg <p...@hagelb.org> wrote: > One of the most common complaints about the current implementation of > Clojure is that the stack traces are often unreadable. At work we have > been using Mark McGranaghan's clj-stacktrace library[1] to print stack > traces, and it does a great job of cleaning them up and making it much > clearer as to what the actual cause of the problem is. I've found it > invaluable for this--it provides indentation, better details, and even > coloring to help make the relevant frames stand out in the noise. > > I've spoken to him about it, and he is agreeable to the idea of > merging it into Clojure. He is the sole author of it, and it sounds > like he'd be fine with relicensing and copyright assignment. > > It appears at first glance to be compatible with the existing > clojure.stacktrace library. Obviously before it could be merged we > would need to investigate this more thoroughly, but I think it could > be a valuable improvement to Clojure 1.3. > > Thoughts? > > -Phil > > [1] - http://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-stacktrace > > -- > 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 -- 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
