cloture VS rich4clojure

For reference, and to show that it's possible, you might be interested in how I did this for Cloture (Clojure in CL): https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture/blob/master/clojure/core.lisp

Why not use something like https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture (a Clojure "adapter" that runs on Common Lisp) if you want that?

Clojure on Common Lisp: https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture

It does not offer the full experience. It has no breakloop and no ability to browse and edit the live running environment. It has no ability to rummage around inside the dynamic environment of a suspended function call, much less to redefine the suspended function or the types of its parameters, nor to restart the suspended call. Indeed, the JVM makes some of that stuff really inconvenient to do.

You cannot do everything from the Clojure repl in the way you can from a Common Lisp repl or from a Smalltalk worksheet.

I don't know that the Clojure language design forbids it; you might, for example, implement Clojure on top of a Lisp or Smalltalk environment and hook up their tools to Clojure through its interop. That might work, and ruricolist has been working on such an implementation called Cloture:

https://github.com/ruricolist/cloture

But existing Clojure implementations don't have the full set of tools.

The old 4Clojure site is not available any longer. I can (in a highly biased way) recommend using Rich4CLojure in the comfort of your favorite editor.

I've been messing with Clojure/ClojureScript for a few years having previously had zero Lisp experience. Overall, I think Clojure does a good job of being both practical and lispy. It's a language that is for building real things.

I've been focusing on ClojureScript (https://clojurescript.org/) as you get the benefit of interoperating with the Javascript ecosystem. The fact that there's a strong community around both Javascript hosted and Java hosted gives a wealth of library options.

Overall, the tooling has been getting a lot closer to the sort of experience that contemporary developers expect. The Calva plugins integration with Visual Studio (https://calva.io/) makes it easy to get started - you can even run it online with gitpod (https://github.com/PEZ/rich4clojure).

That just leaves learning the language - the slight changes in syntax (brackets for different data types) definitely help early on, and for the most part Clojure discourages people going down the path of macros which means reading other peoples code is reasonably accessible. The main struggle is that it's a language used by a lot of advanced or full-time developers, so documentation is pretty dense and it can take a real commitment to understand the detail.

It may not be 'correct' enough if you're coming from other Lisps, but coming the other way from C/Python etc I've found it an accessible and practical option.

Rich 4Clojure (editor/IDE based 4Clojure with a zero-install option)

(And arlier this week I did an adaption of Rich 4Clojure, adding a zero-install option there as well.)

A cheap (in terms of effort and impact on your computer) way to see how you like Calva is to try the Gitpod option of Rich 4Clojure: https://github.com/PEZ/rich4clojure