How I Start: Clojure • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#11

Post by dustingetz » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

expando wrote: post #4

I really would have benefitted from this when I was learning Clojure. There were a lot of "Getting Started" tutorials, but I could never find any that quite scratched the "experienced dev trying clojure for the first time" itch.

> "experienced dev trying clojure for the first time"

You're looking for Seven Languages in Seven Weeks http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Languages-Weeks-Programming-Prog...

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#12

Post by mshenfield » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

edgyswingset wrote: post #5

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #3

Great writeup. Side note: If it were upto to me, I'd recommend Cursive Clojure (with IntelliJ) to beginners. No steep learning curve and works flawlessly! https://cursiveclojure.com/ EDIT: Added link

I'd recommend it until recently. I'm unsure why, but even with a fresh install of IDEA it fails outright and refuses to load on both of the machines I have it installed on.

I stumbled across this yesterday - it is a known issue with IDEA 14.1. There's instructions on a fix here: https://github.com/cursiveclojure/cursive/issues/813

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#13

Post by not-much-io » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #3

Great writeup. Side note: If it were upto to me, I'd recommend Cursive Clojure (with IntelliJ) to beginners. No steep learning curve and works flawlessly! https://cursiveclojure.com/ EDIT: Added link

I second this. Although I myself use Emacs and am very happy with it, Cursive allows focusing on Clojure and not on the setup. Though once some level of skill has been achieved, I'd recommend Emacs. :)

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#14

Post by stevecalifornia » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

I really like this website and hope it continues to add examples. As a Microsoft oriented developer, it's nice to be able to peek over the shoulder of someone who is knowledgeable in another area and see how they do things.

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#15

Post by mshenfield » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

markc wrote: post #2

Nice. I think this meets an important need in the Clojure tutorial space, focusing on the many dimensions of a typical problem-solving workflow rather than the tool setup or language itself. This sort of "how do you get stuff done" description, touching on package management, REPL exploration, coding, testing, deployment, connecting with APIs, etc. is useful in helping people gain confidence and productivity. It's lo…

+1 This is a nice dive with some immediate gratification. I got a lot of encouragement from Clojure for the Brave and True http://www.braveclojure.com/. It is a deeper read (gets to core.async), but still fun in the spirit of "why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" and "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good".

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#16

Post by not-much-io » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

This is an excellent tutorial, kudos to the author! As an additional supplement for beginners I'd also suggest solving some coding challenges in Clojure on pages like HackerRank. It's addictive fun and supplies cool problems to solve at will, made a big difference for me.

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#17

Post by puredanger » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 6:20 PM UTC

not-much-io wrote: post #16

This is an excellent tutorial, kudos to the author! As an additional supplement for beginners I'd also suggest solving some coding challenges in Clojure on pages like HackerRank. It's addictive fun and supplies cool problems to solve at will, made a big difference for me.

The http://www.4clojure.com/ site does a great job of this.

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#18

Post by ticking » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 6:24 PM UTC

not-much-io wrote: post #13

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #3

Great writeup. Side note: If it were upto to me, I'd recommend Cursive Clojure (with IntelliJ) to beginners. No steep learning curve and works flawlessly! https://cursiveclojure.com/ EDIT: Added link

I second this. Although I myself use Emacs and am very happy with it, Cursive allows focusing on Clojure and not on the setup. Though once some level of skill has been achieved, I'd recommend Emacs. :)

Why though? Cursive has a working debugger while Emacs doesn't. Emacs has a lot of stuff outside the realm of Clojure, like irc mail and orgmode, but Cursive really is the more advanced Clojure environment. Even @dnolen seems to have switched to it.

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#19

Post by ticking » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 6:27 PM UTC

I really don't see the advantage of trying to sell clojure and emacs as a package, it just alienates a lot of potential newcomers. Sadly almost every Clojure tutorial I've seen so far does this.

Most tutorials for other programming languages simply go with a text editor of your choice + a console repl.

Re: How I Start: Clojure

#20

Post by coolsunglasses » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 6:31 PM UTC

ticking wrote: post #19

I really don't see the advantage of trying to sell clojure and emacs as a package, it just alienates a lot of potential newcomers. Sadly almost every Clojure tutorial I've seen so far does this. Most tutorials for other programming languages simply go with a text editor of your choice + a console repl.

I'm an ex-Clojurian using Haskell, and my time spent in console REPL vs. Emacs Haskell REPL is pretty evenly split.

I'm was quite grateful the terminal REPL (ghci) is better than `lein repl`. Which I use (Emacs vs. term) in what circumstance depends in part on how long I'm going to be heads down on the problem I'm working on.