[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.