[Barrin92]

emacs and cider are rock-solid tools for Clojure, as are equivalent plugins for other lisps. It's not a very beginner-friendly tool, but I'm pretty convinced it really is the best environment for lisp development there is.

I'm not saying that having more mainstream tooling wouldn't be good, but people should not be discouraged from Clojure or Lisp development because of an apparent lack of tooling.

[thowfaraway]

Telling someone new to a language to start with emacs & cider is a disaster. They are rock solid amazing tools for 2% of programmers. I like emacs, but it is harder to learn than Clojure, and trying to teach someone both at the same time is tough. Plus there is no real community unity in editor choice, so you have the community split over emacs, Cursive, VS Code/Calva, Atom. Plus a bunch of dead ends like Light Table or Nightcode.

[puredanger]

You say that like having 4 or 5 solid editors for Clojure is bad because no unity. To me, it seems great because there are a wealth of choices for people that like different things and many of them are excellent, well above the bar for being a productive developer.

[thowfaraway]

It is probably net positive for advanced users who have niche needs that the different editors address, but I'm saying it is bad for beginners/learners. More specifically, I'm saying emacs/cider is bad for beginners/learners, and the more traditional IDE options aren't so solid.

[waffletower]

I use Cider every day professionally. It is so far from being a rock in any way. Embarassingly inconsistent release to release. Every major release has a new major bug. The REPL lag in Cider 23/Emacs 26 is stupefying. The more text in the buffer, and it doesn't take much, the lag increases exponentially. Google the issue and you will see the angry defendents blame you and your packages. Profile! Profile! Profile! I didn't change anything, Emacs 26 and Cider changed for the worse.