Nightcode: An IDE for Clojure and Java | Hacker News Reader

Nightcode: An IDE for Clojure and Java

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167 pointsanon1i4029252 comments

This seems to be the blog post about it: http://www.marshut.com/sspkm/nightcode-an-ide-for-clojure-an...

It's nice to see people getting passionate about this sort of thing, but it's incredibly alpha, and atm it doesn't seem to have any features worth writing home about. At least, not from what I could tell after playing around with it for a little bit.

I'm the creator of Nightcode, and I agree, which is why I didn't announce it here. It is pretty half-baked and I was hoping to fix some of the more obvious bugs before promoting it more. That being said, I can't really complain.

Any plans for Clojurescript support?

Also, is it just me or is every new editor/IDE using that same Sublime-ish colour scheme?

If you are wondering about Clojurescript support, just take a look at the screenshot ...

Oops, I hadn't looked - I haven't played with Clojurescript yet, but it's on my list.

From the announcement blog post:

-Cool looking dark theme, because that’s trendy these days

Just wanted to say that I like the color scheme. Where can I find the color definitions?

I'm using the Graphite skin from the Insubstantial project:

http://insubstantial.github.io/insubstantial/substance/docs/...

https://github.com/Insubstantial/insubstantial

Thanks!

I see this (very cool-looking) IDE has one-click Clojure Android project skeletons. I'm in the midst of Android development, and find that Java is slowing me down more than I would have anticipated. I just can't sketch out ideas like I do in scripting languages. So my question is: how is Clojure on Android these days? I know that historically, it's had some performance issues. Are these getting better? Is interaction with the Android API pretty seamless?

I'm half-tempted to use Nightcode just to spare me the pain of trying to set up a Android project using Clojure. If any of the previous non-Java languages I've used on Android are any indication (Python and Lua, mainly), it's a huge pain in the ass. I really wish Google had built a more polyglot-friendly environment in Android.

This seems like the place to start. https://github.com/clojure-android/lein-droid

This is amazing.. The greatest thing you have done ( I havent checked out the whole IDE yet ) is to reduce the whole step of setting things up down to 1 click.. The biggest gripe I had with Clojure / Cljs was the setup process.. I am not familiar with the java world and I hate setting things up before getting my hands dirty. This sir, does everything for me.

Just wow! and thank you.

In the command-line, `lein new my-project` sets everything up for you.

If you're looking for a Clojure IDE, you should check out Light Table: http://www.lighttable.com/

Although I agree that LightTable is a more polished clojure IDE, it doesn't do the one thing that ganarajpr mentioned: create lein projects for you through the UI.

Even though lein is easy to use, integration like this lowers the barrier to entry for new folks wanting to learn clojure, which is awesome.

You stole the words in my mouth.. I am going to cry plagiarism ;)

Doesn't anyone else find it odd that command-line tools would be a barrier to entry for programmers? Sure, I see it all the time; I just don't get what people are expecting.

I just released 0.0.2, so those who are having issues with running and building on 0.0.1 may have better luck this time. It also now correctly uses command instead of control for keyboard shortcuts on OS X.

As I said before, it is still a very early release, so please let me know about other bugs you find.

I'm using IntelliJ which has so far been great for great for Clojure and Java plus every other language I use. I'm definitely willing to give this a shot and I also want to know if you're looking at doing any Scala support?

I'm in the same boat - I've been a very happy IDEA user for over a decade now, and any other IDE that targets the JVM has a pretty high bar as far as I'm concerned.

With that said, I'd love to see the Scala equivalent of this - the Scala plugin for IDEA works fairly well (they still have quite a few problems with inline error highlights/parsing when your Scala code uses path dependent types), but the Typesafe official Scala IDE uses Eclipse, which utterly rules it out as far as I'm concerned.

A lightweight but functional Scala-native IDE with builtin sbt support would be absolutely awesome for a pure-Scala project.

> A lightweight but functional Scala-native IDE with builtin sbt support would be absolutely awesome for a pure-Scala project.

This would indeed be wonderful. I have been using Scala as my first language of choice for some time now and personally feel that Scala is still held back a bit in terms of tooling. Please consider this!

I write Clojure and Scala, Clojure got me into Emacs and then Emacs+Ensime led me away from IDEA for Scala development. I recommend it fully.

I am a big fan of IDEA and use that for Java and Groovy, and also Jetbrains' AppCode for Obj-C development, but the Scala support in IDEA is currently just not good enough.

How is AppCode compared to xCode? Everyone has been telling me I need to make the switch but I don't want to break any of my existing iOS projects.

I can't really give you a fair comparison, I've only used Xcode enough to know that I don't like it.

I don't even think the full switch can ever be made. Because it's Apple development, everything is in an "Xcode project" (instead of, say, "iOS project"). So even using AppCode I'm still dropping back to Xcode some of the time.

Would this be a good resource for learning Clojure for someone who's a rather inexperienced programmer? I remember looking at Leiningen a while back and being a little lost. I've heard really good things about Clojure and functional programming in general but I still have my programmer training wheels on.

Yeah I definitely made Nightcode with newbies in mind. Like I said before, it is half-baked and probably too buggy for normal use right now, but eventually I hope it serves as a good entryway for Clojure and Java programming.

Re: learning resources, I found the book "Clojure Programming" by Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, and Christophe Grand to be excellent.

http://www.clojurebook.com/

After reading through that, the exercises at http://4clojure.com/ helped me to solidify things and learn what the core library has available. Work through a problem on your own and then check out how someone like 'immo' or 'jbear' did it.

How does it compare to Emacs, Idea and Eclipse?

I've been planning to learn a modern (compared to Interlisp, which I used in the 80s) Lisp for a long time. What stops me is the need to 1st learn a very complicated IDE.

I'm also having some doubts about Clojure compared to true Lisps - those store all data as lists for a very good reason - it allows fantastic code reuse.

About your last point, Clojure's seqs enable code reuse. You can operate on lists, vectors, sets, maps, etc as seqs. I don't know about Interlisp, but Common Lisp does not unify these datatypes under such a common sequence abstraction.

>I don't know about Interlisp, but Common Lisp does not unify these datatypes under such a common sequence abstraction.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/c_sequ...

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/t_seq....

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.65....

https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/pcl/sequence.li...

EDIT: Some actual problems http://ilc2009.scheming.org/node/7

Yes, I had Rhodes' work in mind. In Common Lisp, sequences are hardcoded as lists and vectors. [1] Which excludes the sets and hashtables (which I mentioned), not to mention anything sequence-like which users might come up with. (Actually, it doesn't even have sets built in. I've seen people use degenerate hashtables to simulate them — keys which just hash to true.)

Furthermore, the by far most common mapping functions operate only on proper lists, not sequences. [2] And in the very popular (albeit notorious) LOOP macro, one must even use in/across/"k being the hash-key using (hash-value v)", depending on whether you're operating on lists, vectors or hashtables respectively! [3]

(Of course, one could add these things to CL, in the sense that you have all of CL's power in C — by implementing CL atop C. Or you could invent your own generic seq functions, and hope others use it.)

Someone could point out that had CL's standard had continued to evolve, it might've had these things. Or that these limitations were due to weaker computers. But whatever happened happened, and this is the real-world CL we have. CL's a wonderfully powerful language (not counting the troll-dominated community), but there's seams.

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/26_glo...

[2] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_mapc...

[3] http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/doc/cl/loop.html

The ITERATE macro is a bit more powerful.

" But whatever happened happened, and this is the real-world CL we have."

Some of my links were there to point out that it's not really, we do have extensible sequences in SBCL for example.

Thanks for making such a long reply for what basically was link dumping.

What do you customarily edit code in? Clojure works quite nicely with both vim and emacs.

Nowadays Visual Studio + ReSharper.

I am unlikely to witch my Java IDE away from Netbeans and unfortunately Netbeans does not have any support for Clojure. (Enclojure is dead).I wish someone would would develop a Clojure plugin for NB. That would solve a real problem for those gently switching to Clojure.

IDEA shouldn't be too foreign to you, and I'm pretty sure the clojure plugin runs in the free community edition.

I like the idea and might contribute to the source.

I have the feeling the response to keystrokes is somewhat delayed? Type "asdf" for example and you will set it takes perhaps 1.5x more than it should and its not even.

there are quite a few editors to code in clojure and I don't see how you can differentiate from the others, but good luck, it looks promising. I personally use macvim/vim.

Are there really that many Clojure IDEs available? I suspect you're conflating IDE and text editor.

I think the only major one is the IntelliJ plugin (though SLIME is a sort of marginal case).

don't forget the Eclipse plugin Counterclockwise: https://code.google.com/p/counterclockwise/

He only said "editors", so he's still in the clear.

I don't know at there are a ton, but the first one that comes to mind for me is lighttable, which is pretty rad, if you ask me.

Hey, this is awesome. I've never been able to get too far with Clojure because of unfamiliarity with tooling and lack of desire to setup Emacs/Slime.

Slime is the deprecated way of working with Clojure in emacs, nrepl is the future:

https://github.com/clojure-emacs/nrepl.el

This doesn't avoid emacs though if you're not an emacs user ;)

This is loads easier to setup and works really, really well.

If you're actually avoiding Emacs, Vim/Fireplace/nRepl feels pretty darn good =)

I'm having success introducing even my noob programmer friends to Clojure by directing them to install Leiningen (Clojure's build tool) and Lighttable (editor with integrated repl).

Generate the project skeleton:

$ lein new foobar

Open up folder `foobar` with Lighttable, and you can begin evaluating code in your source files (it starts you with foobar/src/core.clj).

And you're off.

Emacs + nrepl if properly set up is really the killer combo. You get instant popup-style access to documentation, auto-complete, repl and unit test integration.

with paredit the ( ) handle themselves pretty much.

I wrote up some notes on setting it up here:

http://crucialfelix.github.io/clojure/2013/05/16/learn-by-wr...

I am getting : "Error: Could not find or load main class nightcode.lein" when clicking "Run" in ClojureScript, v 0.0.3.

This looks exciting. The Android integration is really attractive to me. I'll be sure to try this out soon. Thanks, gw!

I can't figure out how to use/find templates ...

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