While editing some program text recently, I noticed myself doing something weird. I do most of my programming in Clojure these days. I mostly use IntelliJ IDEA with the Cursive plugin for Clojure. This turns out to be a great way to develop. One of the (many) things I love about IntelliJ IDEA is that it does spell checking in my code. Stops me looking (so much) like an idiot when I misspell stuff in comments.
I’ve been away awhile, working on a new project. It’s part of an educational effort about molecular dynamics simulation. Although I’ve been working a lot with Clojure using emacs for editing, this project required a return to Java. As a result, I’ve been using NetBeans again. The difference in productivity was amazing and not in the way I expected.
One of the things about Clojure that is difficult for beginners is the process of creating and running programs. I would argue that it is more difficult than learning the language itself. There is no “one-button” provisioning system that would set up some sort of canonical development environment. This long post will talk about setting up Leiningen and Emacs to make a comfortable environment for developing in Clojure.
I’ve used enclojure (Broken Link) for a long time (in internet years). It has always seemed a bit finicky. However, with the 1.4 release and the switch to using Maven as the build tool, things stopped working. Projects that had worked fine before no longer compiled or executed. The “Getting Started” section of the enclojure web page appears to be hopelessly out of date and actually misleading. Here’s what I had to do.