Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners
#2I'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
#3This 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…
Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners
#4Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners
#5Repo: 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
#6This 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
#7Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners
#8Developer 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…
Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners
#9Re: Maria: A ClojureScript coding environment for beginners
#10I've been wanting to take https://lambda.quest in a similar direction. Interactive tutorials are the future!