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Comment by devonrt | Hacker News Reader

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problem is a lack of a "canonical" setup; if you Google around for Clojure and Slime most directions you find will be out of date, highly personalized, or both.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.

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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.

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