Try Clojure – An interactive tutorial in the browser

you could but the more advanced part will not work. For example for some chapter SICP assume you can use code as data.

add-libs lets you add Java libraries as well, or Clojure libs that themselves depends on Java libs. So for the JVM you need a JVM specific implementation that can pull Java libs. And when adding pure Clojure libs, you're right, it could be from source directly similar to typing it all into the REPL.

For JS, it's a bit more complicated for the Clojure side, because the compiler isn't in the runtime, SCI is interpreting the Clojure code, it is not compiling it to JS and loading it, which makes adding a source pure Clojure lib tricky. But it could possibly be done for compiled Clojure libs and JS libs, that said I think you couldn't use any forms of advance compilation, because that messes up the references. So there's a lot of caveat I think to doing it in JS and that's why it's not done.

> How do people who write Clojure deal with lack of type checking?

Runtime asserts, typically.

It ends up being somewhat less of an issue in practice than someone coming from Java or Kotlin would assume, I think, because clojure really only has a single datatype: a sprawling, immutable soup of nested maps and vectors. The design of the standard library is such that your standard data manipulation functions will basically always work on every data structure you get passed, so you end up designing your internal APIs so that they take in a blob of data, perform an operation if the soup has the right components (and probably throw an exception if not), and then spit out that changed blob of data.

Is this better (or at minimum no worse) than having a type system? That's a broader question of philosophy and taste that I'm still undecided myself (for instance, I think the type systems in Haskell and Rust are really quite valuable, but the ones in Java and Go don't really pull their weight), but it's not something I really miss on a day-to-day basis writing clojure code--it's just a different way of doing things.

> And auto-complete when it comes to Java library interop?

My experience as both a professional and hobbyist clojure user is that this is not a huge issue in practice:

- Java interop tends to get wrapped in clojure defns so you can get your auto-complete pop-up off the namespace alias.

- At least with my setup (emacs+cider), adding a (:import (...)) clause to a ns form allows me to autocomplete on all method names of classes in scope (and provides type-annotated signatures), so I can still auto-complete when performing interop. I believe IntelliJ+cursive is even better about that sort of thing, and if I were working directly with Java libraries/APIs a lot I would probably consider switching IDEs for that reason.

Thanks for this! I just finished the tutorial and really enjoyed it! Found myself hoping for more. Maybe a small series that would teach one the necessary basics of Clojure so one could actually do a real project in it afterwards. That would be awesome :)

Thanks mate, really good material!