But hundreds of hours?

Whelp.

Ya, I wish I could say a few hours. But I'm thinking about how long it took me, and it was probably more in line with 100 hours

That could be that the tools are rough around the edges, I mean, most tooling is maintained by one person on their free time. It could be there that things could be made more intuitive and better UX and all, which would reduce that time a lot.

I may not be around for a 100 hours. I’m learning and evaluating.

Yeah, I’m getting the niche language experience very heavily now that I’m trying FP.

But also, part of it is building the knowledge of how the read/eval cycle works in Clojure and how evaluation is handled

Ya, Clojure will always feel a bit like that. I tell people its that same feeling you get from using Linux

Like, everything is nice and simple, but there's no one adding the polish that say OSX has

And I think that's a reason why it isn't super beginner friendly, and why its mostly used by very senior devs

I am a very senior dev.

I also am very sensitive to developer experience.

I meant senior like prior experience with Lisps and JVM

Like if your an Emacs user for 30 years

I mean I’ve done a LISP tutorial at some point but this seems to be the only current one left?

The Clojure tooling and repl would be super natural

And I got as far away as I could of the JVM after university.

Ya. That for sure means there's more to learn

I know people who tried Clojure years ago for a bit. Stopped. Tried it again a few years after. Stopped. And now trying it again the 3rd is when it finally start to click

I think the best dev experience would be to use Cursive in IntelliJ

You should try it. It is free for non commercial use I believe.

And I do recommend getting familiar with the repl driven workflow as soon as possible

That’s nice. I try not to touch IntelliJ and write everything I do in Code.

https://cursive-ide.com/

Ya, I'm not a fan of intellij either, too bloated. I use Emacs, but In wouldn't recommend that to someone starting out

But it does have the most out of the box just works Clojure experience I believe and is unbeatable for java

This seems to work well right now, just holy shortcuts…

Well, so. Repl driven is that you basically start a blank Clojure program (with the libraries you expect to make use of setup on your classpath). And from that blank slate, you inject at runtime additional functionality to piece together a full program

Now you have to understand that Clojure is not file based. So the source files arn't known to Clojure. They're just where you put code and save it to retrieve it later.

And what’s the source code file for then?

This sounds like really weird situation, weirder even than the entire GOPATH thing.

yes, the weird thing is that in Clojure parsing and compilation is a runtime event

But what does “load current file” mean then?

In your IDE, that means the editor will copy the code in the editor file and send it to the REPL

And that will hopefully overwrite any old garbage that was there with the same names?

It will overwrite things with the same name yes

But don’t people program collaboratively and distribute code?

Like run programs?

With one or two caveats due to the underlying JVM, but those are rare and you are probably not using things that have those quite yet

What it won't do is unload what has already been sent to the REPL

For example

And for that you would occasionally clear the REPL I guess?

(def a 10)
(println a)

Yes. And I was told calva has a function for that should be called refresh

Not sure of the shortcut

OK. But in short it comes down to that this is more of a lifestyle than a tool?

But refresh will delete everything from the repl and load it a fresh

Eh, I guess that's one way to put it. It is a different approach to programming entirely

I mean to be fully productive I’ll have to inhabit this stuff, go deep on a bunch more tools than I would like and memorize a bunch of shortcuts.

Think of the difference between a classical music composer write music on sheets of paper. Where as a rock band would jam along and write down things after once what they have is good

Yea, pretty much

That's why it has a steep learning curve

But people use source files for projects and collaboration though?

But maybe I’ll just finish the book first.

And my day3 of the Advent of Code.

And you either hate it or love it. I find it pure fun and a joy, and so I enjoy that way of programming a lot more. That's why I put in the effort to learn

I’m considering this because I find Haskell to be offputting.

Ya, you use source files and git

Its more the way it comes together is different

Clojure has features to load code from a file, as convenience, because that's the most common way to do it

But its more of a convention based approach

For example, lein requires clojure.set for you automatically when launching the repl.

And I hate type systems in general. It looks like Clojure doesn’t really have one?

Why? Because sometimes you just want to open the repl, mess around and not have to type a require for something so common

But if you start the program without lein repl, that won't be there. That's what I mean by there's conventions around.

It is a dynamic language, without a static type system. Though there is a a unofficial library called core.typed that adds optional typing, but it isn't very popular

But it is still a compiled language. Unlike python, ruby and JS. That last part is a bit confusing, but for the most part you can ignore it as an implementation detail

When you do lein run... What happens is a blank Clojure program is launched, your project.clj dependencies are added to the classpath, and your main namespace is loaded

I still haven’t read these parts of the book yet. I read half of it and thought I could with a bit of violence slam myself through the #adventofcode assignment.

That means every top level form is read, compiled, loaded and evaled one by one from top to bottom in your main namespace

But... As it encounters calls to 'require' it will pause and go load that namespace (the one defined by require) first. This happend recursively until everything is loaded in dependency (or required) order, where each namespace is evaluated from top to bottom

I think what’s nice about this is that it is off-putting enough to other programmers. My main is Python but that is so mainstream by now…

And what you should understand is that's just a convention. You could write a different launcher and a require-weird function that loads things on a different order.

And at the REPL, you choose the order by choosing what to send to repl and when to send it

Ya, so.. For example, most Clojure devs find jupyter notebook a bit dumb

I don’t get it either.

Because its just a more restrictive form of REPL. Where as Calva is like a more powerful jupyter notebook

Where you get a full VSCode to edit the code and run it at the same time, and you can split the code accross multiple files, etc.

Anyways. I recognize there's a lot to learn here.

Thats another thing. Things in Clojure are well thought out. There's almost always a great reason why everything is as it is, even if it could be non obvious. But Clojure is super powerful!!

Its the opposite of Python's one and only one way

Yeah, I hate that a bit especially in the tooling space.

Clojure has all the features of all of the other languages combined (almost)

Ya, it can be easy to lose yourself. At the same time, it means you can learn about and get exposed to a lot as well

And the thing is, they're all pretty good. Like, people are always looking for what's the best X. Generally in Clojure all options are good, and just have different tradeoffs.

For example, Boot, Lein, tools.deps are all good package manager!

And people use each one successfully and happily

But its not very beginner friendly. If someone asks which one to learn, its like... Any of them will be good enough

Even for editors. Calva, Chlorine, Cursive, Cider, clojure-lsp, spiral, vim-fireplace, vim-iced, etc. They all have pros/cons

Anyways 😛, I could go on and on... (I really like Clojure haha).

I hope you end up enjoying it as well.

Haha. Let’s see how it goes.

It’s easier to get into than Haskell or Rust, that’s for sure.

Ah! Well that's a start

And weirdly enough a bunch of people I know already seem to have made this jump.

I'm also new to REPL development and I'm kind of confused. I'm in Cursive/IntelliJ and although it starts in my core namespace, the REPL doesn't automatically run my code by default. I have to copy-paste in all my def's and defn's into the REPL. Is that the intended workflow? Or is there some option I have to set?

Well, I quite like Rust as well. My second favourite language after Clojure 😉

@US1243555 That's not the intended workflow no

There should be a command that does the copy pasting for you?

If you right click anywhere inside the file there should be a Closure Repl menu, and inside you should see Send to repl and Load file with the shortcut displayed

oh i see it! thanks!

Ya. So Load file in repl is the same as copy pasting the whole file to the repl

And Sync files in REPL will load all out-of-date files from the editor to the REPL in the correct order

I think based on the project setting, so starting from the specified main namespace

neato

And definitely learn to use: "Run form before cursor"

Learn that shortcut and use it like every 30 seconds

Normally I use Load file from repl and Run form before cursor the most

And I almost never type in the repl itself

When I change a function, add a function or add a def I do Load file from repl after

Or if I changed many files I do Sync

And then to test my code I write code to call my functions or test things directly in the file, sometimes prefixed with a #_ or inside a (comment) and run it with Run form before cursor

I call that REPL only code, and that's why it is commented out. So it doesn't run on load, but the editors are smart enough to send the code inside the comment to the repl when doing Run form before cursor

very cool. I see it can also run tests.

Ya. Oh also using Switch repl ns is useful

Because when you Run form before cursor, it runs it inside namespace the repl is currently in

Not the namespace of the file you are in

most often you'll want to switch the repl to the ns your are in before, so that shortcut is useful as well

I do not know the answer, but wanted to point out that there is a #cursive channel that might be more likely to find someone who knows.

This is what I see now wrt to the wrap in the REPL. Things are getting cramped.

I would keep the REPL window closed and evaluate things inline in the editor instead.

Evaluate does not execute functions? I just ran it on my -main.

What is this saying to me other than that there is no syntax error in this def?

Yeah. Sorry. I’m assuming too much. What I do instead of evaluating in the REPL window, is that I put the things I want to evaluate inside a (comment…) form, often at the bottom of the file, but also often just below the the function I want to test. Calva has a command that evaluates the top level form inline, and the command treats comment forms as creating a new top level. You can see it in action here: https://calva.readthedocs.io/en/latest/try-first.html

I’m heading for bed. Please feel welcome to ask for help in #calva-dev. Hopefully others can step in while I catch up on lost sleep. 😃

No thank you! I fixed the bug in my code and can at a basic level work with this.

Glad you have progress! The offer still stands if you run into more questions.

Let’s say I’m overjoyed that I do not have to learn Emacs to get into this. 😅

if you want to keep up with emacs i can help you but it might be better to go with vs code and Calva

@U11BV7MTK is that because of the learning curve? If so, I'll definitely opt for something simpler. Clojure Twitter recommended Cursive + IntelliJ.

I think clojure community is largely 50% CIDER 50% cursive. You’ll be well served by cursive

thanks. much appreciated.

The most beginner friendly is just to use time https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/time

But its the most limited in features too

I actually have that one always in my REPL ready to go

Thanks, that paid off. I know where the time is going, but not why yet.