get-started-with-clojure VS babashka

Yep your experience is (sadly) not even remotely unusual, and Cognitect have repeatedly demonstrated that they don’t care about this issue (which will come back to bite them as the community stagnates).

The “best” advice I have for Clojure beginners is to follow this guide: https://calva.io/get-started-with-clojure/, which will ultimately land you in a solid VSCode-based IDE environment for Clojure.

That’s not how I personally like to approach a new language mind you (REPL from the command line plz), but I’ve pretty much given up trying to get Clojure beginners started there as there are just too many moving parts that can go wrong, and unjustifiable frictions.

https://calva.io/get-started-with-clojure/ (Do this first) https://calva.io/getting-started/

You're 2 clicks away from having a fully-featured clojure environment, thanks to Calva (vscode clojure plugin) running in the browser:

- click here[0]

- click on SSO provider

More information here[1]. And of course, you might also simply use the Calva plugin with VSCode. That's a bit more than 2 clicks, maybe 5?

[0] https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/PEZ/get-started-with-c...

It also gives you access to Babashka if you want Clojure for other use-cases where start-up time is an issue

https://babashka.org/

I've tried researching this myself and can't find too much. There's this project metaes which is an mci for JS, and there's the SCI module of the Clojure babashka project, but that's about it. I also saw Triska's video on mci but it was pretty theoretical.

Created by the same guy who created babashka which is a way to write bash scripts, node scripts, and even apple scripts using Clojure. A very proficient and influential developer in the Clojure community. This is how borkduke's neil helps us:

Not what you asked for but there is Babashka for scripting in Clojure.

https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Clojure's lazy sequences by default are wonderful ergonomically, but it provides many ways to use strict evaluation if you want to. They aren't really a hassle either. I've been doing Clojure for the last few years and have a few grievances, but overall it's the most coherent, well thought out language I've used and I can't recommend it enough.

There is the issue of startup time with the JVM, but you can also do AOT compilation now so that really isn't a problem. Here are some other cool projects to look at if you're interested:

Malli: https://github.com/metosin/malli

Babashka: https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Clerk: https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk

Being a Clojure addict, I guess I have to leave the obligatory link to Babashka too then: https://github.com/babashka/babashka (Native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting)

which is now on hiatus. babashka: https://babashka.org

I've enjoyed babashka for scripting; which is close enough to clojure to allow using some/many libraries; but (probably) not for embedding.