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Comment by ihodes | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me as though people aren't reading the whole post.

Brian loves Emacs (and Vim), and will continue to use them for developing in Clojure.

Right now much of the Clojure user base is rather avant-garde, but if we want newcomers to the language, it needs to be easier to get into.

Setting up a development environment can be a pain in the ass for the experienced user; imagine the impossible hell it could be for the newbie.

I think that's his point: it's a little more complex than "emacs is hard".

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I can attest to the fact that setting up a Clojure/Emacs/Slime/Leiningen environment is a huge PITA. Something like Clojure Box helps, but it sacrifices flexibility in favor of ease of use and hides a lot of underlying configuration from a new user. A big part of the problem is a lack of a "canonical" setup; if you Google around for Clojure and Slime most directions you find will be out of date, highly personalized, or both. They will probably involve checking projects out of a multitude of repos (be they CVS, SVN, or Joe Blow's GitHub branch) and copying mystifying emacs configuration without really understanding what it all does. And then, after all of that, it still might not work. God help you if you want to get it all to work under Windows.

Don't get me wrong, I love Clojure and I... well, I don't hate Emacs, but it's frustrating to have to deal with a lot of setup when one just wants to hack in a new language.

swank-clojure 1.2.0 made the setup process much less painful. Yes, you still need to install Leiningen and Emacs manually. After that, (1) an experienced Emacs user can install clojure-mode and SLIME manually, or (2) anyone can use ELPA to install those two modes. Those are fairly easy tasks, and don't require much tweaking.

swank-clojure 1.2.0, which was always the hardest part, does not need to be installed manually. It just gets listed as a dependency in project.clj, and after that "lein swank" on the command line does magic.

The process has gotten a lot easier and Leiningen has made things way easier. lein-swank is just dreamy and comes close to providing all that nifty class-path handling functionality that something like Eclipse provides for Java. A lot of great work has gone into things like swank-clojure and Leiningen and it's amazing that the Clojure community has pulled together such a great set of tools in such a short period of time. There are languages on the JVM coughScalacough that have been around for a lot longer and really seem to be lagging behind in terms of tools.

Another possible 'canonical' solution is Technomancy (of leiningen fame)'s http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit. Removed a lot of the futz of installing emacs for me. I still haven't worried about slime or swank yet, and i had to use elpa's installer to install a simple clojure-mode (M-x packages-install [enter] clojure-mode [enter] i think) but its got a basic solid seeming emacs with paredit and clojure stuff going for me.

caveat: github was being weird and i couldnt clone the repo so i had to visit the downloads page and get it to package up a snapshot for me.

anyways, its the least painful experience setting up emacs ive had. ymmv?

I can attest to the fact that setting up a Clojure/Emacs/Slime/Leiningen environment

I can't. apt-get install emacs slime sbcl. emacs. M-x slime. Hack away.

This does not include Clojure, nor Leningen (the Clojure build tool), nor does it work on Windows or any environment that does not have apt-get. No doubt, you will end up with a perfectly suitable environment for playing around with SBCL.

edit to add: How does one even know to install SBCL and hit M-x and type slime to get started? You and I might already know these things, but it doesn't really help a stone-cold newbie, they still need a more concrete starting point.

How does one even know there is such a thing as SLIME or Clojure or Leningen? How does one even know that there are computers or that they can be programmed? How do you know?

I do not understand your point. If someone wants to learn Clojure, she certainly knows about Clojure. But she may not know (or care) about Leiningen, Emacs and the rest.

His point is that he doesn't know you need SBCL to program SBCL. At this point, the problem is not that it's too hard to install, it's that he's too dumb.

You have his point right. I just strongly disagree with it.

"I strongly believe that when it comes to computers, there's no such thing as 'intuitive'. There's stuff you've already spent a lot of time getting used to, and there's stuff you haven't."

I'll assume that idea serves him well. It's just clearly false. Some environment are inherently more intuitive than others. A GUI is earier to deal with than an unresponsive terminal just Spanish is easier to learn than Chinese.

Html has been a blessing since it's stopped many programmers like him from having a hand in interface design.

"A GUI is earier to deal with than an unresponsive terminal just Spanish is easier to learn than Chinese."

I don't think you're making the point you want to here. Spanish is easier to learn than Chinese for English speakers, certainly, but it's not inherently more intuitive than Chinese. Spanish is easier to learn for English speakers because it is more similar to what they have already become familiar to. For a speaker of Japanese, Chinese is probably easier to learn than Spanish.

Chinese is difficult for speakers of chinese. They spend a long time drilling the letters.

The GP wasn't talking about complexities of Spanish and Chinese for native speakers, but for speakers of other similar languages.

Presumably, Chinese is easier to learn for Japanese speakers for the same reasons of similarity and familiarity that speakers of English have towards Spanish. If Chinese is inherently difficult, perhaps the Japanese could cope with it better than English speakers, as they had already gone through the rigors of learning Japanese, a language with similar (if not the same) level of difficulty.

I could be reading too much into it, of course :)

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