The Caves of Clojure

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-01/

by joeyespo • 14 years ago

103 20 14 years ago

stevelosh.com

espeed• 14 years ago

Despite its Rubyesque culture of brokenness, rampant lack of documentation, and warty JVM interop...

This has not been my impression.

mattdeboard2• 14 years ago

Ha, this is funny. I came here to say that this has been exactly my impression (sans Java interop warts since I haven't done much there).

There is a lot of missing documentation -- and by that I mean high-quality, contextual, human-readable, practical documentation -- though the community has been working to remedy that.

There is a particular definition of "culture of brokenness" that I'd agree with but there are a lot more that I wouldn't. I'd have to hear the author's definition of what he means by that before I agree.

That being said Clojure is downright beautiful. I wish I had opportunity to work with it more.

bengl3rt• 14 years ago

To me the most frustrating thing about programming in Clojure (not that I'm generally frustrated by doing it, in fact I love it) are the totally cryptic/useless error messages, especially syntax errors that don't contain a line number (or they do but it's invariably 0).

Thank goodness for syntax-coloring editors or it would take me hours to track some of these things down.

oskarkv• 14 years ago

I have heard many people complain about the documentation (in fact I've seen you do it before ;)). But I think the documentation is great; concise and informative. I learned more from the docs (the reference) on clojure.org than any book.

drcode• 14 years ago

Brokenness: No. However, the whole clojure.contrib fiasco is admittedly a bit ugly until you figure it out.

Lack of documentation: Yes, some documentation that's a bit more approachable for beginners would be nice.

Warty JVM interop: No, given how unpleasant interop can be, Clojure makes it about as easy as humanly possible.

BadassFractal3• 14 years ago

There are a couple of very recent texts that have been released on Clojure that can all be used in combination to learn it. Programming Clojure and Clojure Programming are both at most 3-4 months old. Taken together, the documentation is fairly extensive.

mark_l_watson2• 14 years ago

I was surprised by the lack of documentation comment in the article. I own four useful Clojure books, and along with effective web searches, any roadblocks are quickly jumped over.

drostie• 14 years ago

That's a starting point, sure, but it's not necessarily a great one. Books are books. They take time to find, money to purchase, time to be delivered, and then they take time to read and pursue.

When I started learning Django, the key thing which everyone pointed me to was a simple screencasted tutorial where a man with an Indian accent started showing me how to write a wiki in Django. It wasn't pretty but it was a way to bootstrap myself enough into the Django mindset that I could start learning how to do database-driven web design. Then I could sit down and read the docs and they mostly made sense. Before that, Django was impenetrable; just seeing "oh there's a data model which is embodied within the databases, you have to run 'syncdb' first to get this working," etc. was a harrowing way to do 'Hello, World!'.

I have a little advantage with Clojure because it is a Lisp and I've done Lisps before when I followed the SICP video lectures and learned some basic Scheme. In this respect coming to Clojure is much easier for me than working with Haskell. (Although seriously, the Haskell interpreter is so much easier to use--please, someone implement libedit or another readline clone in Clojure and put it in the Clojure main distribution so that the 'up' key gives me the last line.)

But nonetheless, this is the first time I've seen a clear attempt to say, "here, let's work together to build a substantial program in Clojure." There is so much you can learn from such approaches that I think it's crucial to have some. Even this first tutorial page starts talking about how you should do some 'lein trampoline run' call rather than trying to do things with Clojure directly: that's something crucial which was never communicated to me via the Clojure web site. I now get to read up on Leiningen and what the hell that is for, as well as perhaps what the hell is in clojure.contrib that they also don't tell you about on the clojure.org "Getting Started" pages.

Seriously. This sort of thing is the difference between `django-admin.py startproject website` and creating a new text file which starts `import django`. Both are technically ways to develop a new site with Django, but the first one is the Correct Way To Do Things. (And fortunately djangoproject.com tells you to do things this way.)

You just pick up so much implicit stuff when you follow someone along as they program a very simple nontrivial application.

BadassFractal3• 14 years ago

Keep us posted, Steve. As someone learning Clojure, I enjoy every bit of its code out there that shows me how things could be done idiomatically.

The Caves of Clojure

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