the issue with WSL2 is simply that it just is not available to everyone.

And narrative "just use WSL2" does not help in any way to write portable programs. That's why I personally don't like this advice at all.

My main concern is a beginner-friendly editor and development experience. My workshop will focus on installing Clojure, and getting started with Visual Studio Code and Calva. How to evaluate expressions in the REPL without leaving the editor. Very basic stuff. Then providing some inspiration on some avenues to explore next, i.e. building web apps with Luminus, creating art with Quil, creating music with Overtone, etc. I don’t know whether installing Clojure via WSL2 will make that experience smoother, but I suspect it would be more tricky to get Clojure working in Visual Studio Code in that way.

@leif.eric.fredheim My 5 cents about this topic can be found here: https://github.com/littleli/scoop-clojure/wiki/Getting-started or here: https://github.com/littleli/scoop-clojure/wiki/Getting-started-VERY-QUICKLY

@UBLU3FQRZ Thanks! Do you happen to know if that setup will work “automagically” in Visual Studio Code with Calva? If it will be detected and work with the jack-in functionality via deps.edn, etc.

Yes. Calva + VSCode works well on Windows.

Jack-in should be smooth. Where you can hit a wall little bit is: • if you want standalone repl: on Windows only use https://github.com/bhauman/rebel-readline, as it contains jline support and that one works good on Windows too. • quote escaping resolution can be very difficult to resolve once you meet with it - was mentioned by @U04V70XH6 • working with paths on Windows is a bit strange Also there is a similar guide based on my project here: https://practical.li/clojure/clojure-cli/install/clojure-cli.html#windows It's probably a lot more famous 🙂

@leif.eric.fredheim I'll be interested to hear an "experience report" after you've run the workshop -- I'd love to hear how the students got on, comparing macOS/Linux to Windows (and % of each type of student at the workshop), if you don't mind sharing.

@U04V70XH6 Will do!

@U04V70XH6 So… 13 people signed up for the workshop, but only 2 people showed up. And they were both experienced developers who used macOS, so I wound up skimming most of my slides for beginners, and the workshop tasks took probably less than 15 minutes 😅 They found it useful to see how to create a barebones app in Clojure, and how to use the interactive development workshop.

Free workshop? Yeah, 15-20% is about expected. Sounds like it went well so 'grats on that!

Just curious, what background would you recommend WSL2 to?

@U015CTPB4HZ For Windows devs that would otherwise use cmd.exe or Powershell, i.e., are not afraid of the command-line (although I would encourage all developers to get comfortable with the command-line at some point). I don't know what to suggest for Windows developers who've never done anything but point'n'click in a UI because I just don't have experience with that (my computing experience has always been some flavor of *nix dating back to the late '70s).

I think imma give wsl2 a shot. I thought you were going to say something crazy like 20+ years experience, and can write their own compiler while on 5 grams of mushrooms.

it's actually really cool what MSFT did there.