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Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners

maria.cloud

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Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners

#2
This is really fantastic!

I've always felt like the lisp family could be a potentially killer educational language, with clojure being a good pick for its focus on functional ideas while being a bit more concise (and practical (looking at scheme)) than some other lisps.

Typically, most programmers start out with an imperative language and then eventually learn a functional language. I've wondered what it would be like to learn programming from scratch starting from key functional concepts like lists, map/fold/filter, recursion, and first class functions.

This kind of drawing program also has the benefit of making it simpler to explain some of the benefits of lisp-like languages specifically, in the sense of "wow i'm typing s-exps of the same structure a whole lot, I wonder if i could make it more elegant to type some how" -> macros.

Clojure has one of the heavier installation procedures, with its dependency on java. Plus, getting a decent repl environment takes at the very least installing rlwrap, and at the most emacs and CIDER. On that note, does anybody know of an all-in-one, simple, repl-focused, lightweight clojure IDE, like the IDLE for Python?

CLJS is looking pretty optimal. I only just played around with Maria, but it seems like a really friendly environment, especially the helpfully named functions, autocomplete, and of course the repl. It's overall super polished, 100% already rivals pygame and logo as educational tools which were super fun for me when I started programming.

Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners

#3
post #2

This is really fantastic! I've always felt like the lisp family could be a potentially killer educational language, with clojure being a good pick for its focus on functional ideas while being a bit more concise (and practical (looking at scheme)) than some other lisps. Typically, most programmers start out with an imperative language and then eventually learn a functional language. I've wondered what it would be lik…

Have you ever looked into Racket?

Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners

#5
Developer here. We wrote Maria 6 years ago, and this fall I accepted a ClojuristsTogether grant to bring it back into active development. We hope to simplify/modernize the codebase to make it something people can hack on top of to add features & apply to new use-cases.

Repo: https://github.com/mhuebert/maria

ClojureD talk introducing Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBHrS4ZzO4

Description of 2022 grant work: http://blog.maria.cloud/2022/09/30/Maria-and-Clojurists-Toge...

I'll be posting updates to twitter, @mhuebert.

Happy to answer any questions / hear ideas for improvement & extension.

Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners

#6
post #3
post #2

This is really fantastic! I've always felt like the lisp family could be a potentially killer educational language, with clojure being a good pick for its focus on functional ideas while being a bit more concise (and practical (looking at scheme)) than some other lisps. Typically, most programmers start out with an imperative language and then eventually learn a functional language. I've wondered what it would be lik…

Have you ever looked into Racket?

You’re right, that’s exactly where Racket really shines.

Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners

#8
post #5

Developer here. We wrote Maria 6 years ago, and this fall I accepted a ClojuristsTogether grant to bring it back into active development. We hope to simplify/modernize the codebase to make it something people can hack on top of to add features & apply to new use-cases. Repo: https://github.com/mhuebert/maria ClojureD talk introducing Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBHrS4ZzO4 Description of 2022 grant work: h…

Just want to say love your work! Js-interop was super useful when I was working in clojurescript land.
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