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Comment by codewright | Hacker News Reader

I mostly hack in Python, but jballanc is not exaggerating when he says Leiningen is reason enough to learn Clojure.

It makes cabal and sbt look really bad. I would slaughter a goat for a Leiningen equivalent in Scala or Haskell.

Go has a solid enough ecosystem already that it isn't really needed.

I wonder just how hard it would be to take it and extend it for Scala. Just my musing 'cause I'm learning Ruby atm and plan on learning one of Prolog, Haskell, or Clojure next.

>I wonder just how hard it would be to take it and extend it for Scala.

That would be insanely compelling.

https://github.com/technomancy/lein-scalac could be a starting point.

The main problem here is that scalac is pretty slow, so you want to leave up the compiler process and just trigger an incremental compile. Last I heard this functionality was tightly coupled to SBT and not available independently. But for simpler projects it might be OK.

In recent months, they've made this available as "zinc" or something and it has been integrated with Maven.

If you go with Clojure, you could cover learning logic programming using the core.logic (https://github.com/clojure/core.logic) library instead of Prolog.

Is there are a more extensive article around somewhere, which describes the advantages of Leiningen? Looking at the documentation it does not look that great.

In a nutshell:

All you have to do is download a little script called lein. You run it to get a skeleton project set up. Add whatever libraries/dependencies you need for the project, including the Clojure version, in the project.clj script. Then start the repl using lein ($ lein repl), and Bob's your Uncle - leiningen manages everything after that. No complicated tool chain set up, not even any need to rely on the package installers on your OS (and the usually outdated versions they provide).

I couldn't help you with an article that tells all, but that was a really compelling story for me.

I never used Scala but I'd be surprised if Maven support for Scala is at minimum.

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