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.
I’ve been updating some of my projects to use the newly released Java 8. That includes many Clojure projects. These are just “flow of consciousness” debugging notes.
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.
Ya know, this point just keeps slapping me in the face. It seems that people don’t stop trying to use Lisp because they don’t like the language. A lot of people stop because they don’t like the programming environment. Looking around the Q&A sites there seem to be many more questions about setting up a programming environment for the Lisp family of languages than there are for the more mainstream languages like Java and C++.