On Mar 27, 2011, at 8:12 PM, Chas Emerick wrote: > > Dependency management and other garbage are definitely garbage, but I know of > no nontrivial programming language that doesn't have its share of it. If you > know of any magical environments that eliminate such administrivia, do share.
A lot of the programming I've done in a variety of languages hasn't required me to deal with dependency management but that was mostly because there weren't any dependencies except the language itself (e.g. in Common Lisp), the language's own libraries which it knows how to find (e.g. standard C libraries), or my own code (which would be in the same file or the same directory). So the issue didn't arise. In other environments I've used "dependency management" is just a matter of putting libraries in single right folder; while that may be awkward for large, complicated projects at least it's clear how to make it work. In more general, flexible, and modern environments I see that there's a real issue there that has to be solved somehow, but I think the problem that the OP raised (or at least the one that resonated with me :-) was that the ways to deal with this in the Clojure world seem to be either complicated to set up and use or not well integrated into the other tools that a newcomer has to deal with. Leiningen seems to be a relatively painless way to do dependency management in Clojure but as far as I know it doesn't play nicely with any similarly painless Clojure-aware editing systems (I mean painless to setup/configure and to use, for newbies). Maybe Clojure Box fits this bill -- but since I don't do Windows I don't know. There are a lot of near misses -- e.g. lein+emacs but emacs is no fun to configure or learn, Eclipse/CCW but then you can't use lein unless you learn some weirdly crufty magic, textmate-clojure except it has some bugs and doesn't seem to be actively supported, etc. I was recently excited by the prospect of a lein+Bluefish combo, but Bluefish doesn't yet have Clojure auto-indenting which I think is one of the minimal required features. (Actually there's a draft of an auto-indent feature in the Bluefish SVN but I haven't had a chance to build and try it yet.) What I heard the OP saying, which I agree with wholeheartedly, is that it would be really swell if there was a package with a trivial installation process that could do all of the necessary things -- editing (with a basic level of Clojure support), dependency management (with defaults that just work for simple newbie projects) and running. This issue has been raised (by me among others) for months or years, and it seems to me that most of the well-seasoned folks around here think it's solved but really it's only something like 90% solved if you're a newbie, and that last 10% makes a big difference. -Lee -- 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
