clojure-cli-config VS Ammonite-Ops

Programming Clojure 3rd edition does have some minimal coverage of the CLI but it just barely made it to publication and a lot has been added since. You might find the CLI guide (https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli) and CLI reference (https://clojure.org/reference/deps_and_cli) to be helpful for some questions. The Practicalli guide (https://practical.li/clojure/) has a number of good pages and resources on repl, tools, and use.

Yeah this is grim.

There is https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn which solves this but it’s not linked to from any official docs which seems a miss to me. As well as the config and full documentation, it also comes with a video walking you through a demo of all the features.

I was lost when I moved to deps from lein, but just forking and cloning https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn as $HOME/.clojure solved the problem - this base deps.edn contained all the aliases I needed - creating a new project, searching and adding dependencies, hooking up data inspectors like portal or reveal, testing, code coverage, benchmarking, building uberjar etc. Moving to deps also introduced me to polylith [1], which has been very useful for building large multi-component projects

[1] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

When I'm looking for tooling related stuff I do always check practical.li (https://practical.li/clojure/) since it probably has a good, if terse, description and mostly has links to the good documentation (or at least the best available).

4. You need build tooling and it seemed the choices were lein (easy user experience but not “blessed” future direction? - not sure about what i’m saying here but it’s the understanding i formed). Tools.deps is the blessed approach but designed to customise the heck out of it - problematic for a beginner like me! Thankfully you can park the customisation for later and just get started with a well laid out starter https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn - there’s even a video walks you through its features, all the inspectors and visualisers are nice to know about but not needed yet on a beginner journey

The indent based syntax is only available in Scala 3, you have to download a matching ammonite version from https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite/releases

That's funny, because this is what I really like about Scala; how quick and easy it is to get a project started.

> sbt new scala/scala3.g8

will just create an empty project. If you don't even want to bother with a project, use use scala-cli or ammonite (http://ammonite.io/) to just start banging out code.

Even the upgrading of a project from Scala2 to Scala3 is a breeze, thanks to very good backwards compatibility of new library releases.

Ammonite is a very good REPL for Scala. You can invoke it with amm and type expressions into it, or load a Scala “script file” whose name ends with .sc into it, or many other things. It’s documented at https://ammonite.io. 2. sbt is the dominant build tool for Scala projects. As others have commented, when you open a folder in Visual Studio Code and try to make Metals “aware of it,” it expects to find a “Scala project” in the folder. A “Scala project” isn’t just Scala source code. See https://www.scala-sbt.org for details. 3. Also be aware that Metals supports worksheets, so you can easily experiment with code in your project interactively, too.

Scripting API is quite limited, so the third option. - reuse the ammonite scripts https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite or look how this is implemented (using internal compiler API),

Your exposure to Functional Programming with Haskell and Clojure suggest you will certainly pick up Scala quickly. With ZIO and cats, you can write robust software quickly. Consider the excellent Coursera Scala course. Get "the Red Book" https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-scala, and most important, play. Experiment to see how things work. Get https://ammonite.io/

Here's an example of a smaller project that added telemetry without suffering a fork:

https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/Ammonite/issues/607

Or ammonite - I've ran Gatling performance test from a simple script based on this gist it fetches all the dependencies, compiles and runs the test, producing nice html report..

Scala with the Typelevel ecosystem. Stay on the jVM, but have a much more pleasant and robust experience, including a great REPL.