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by thih9 2229 days ago
This process might seem easy for you, but maybe not for people installing Clojure for the first time.

In an extreme case, someone who doesn't know Java ecosystem might want to stop to research: what is JVM, why is it necessary, which version would be the best, what's the difference between Oracle's Java and OpenJDK, etc...

2 comments

If you don't know what Java is, you are not in the Clojure target market.
Then they should stop talking about it in /r/Lisp. Nobody there wants anything to do with Java, but Clojurians won't shut up about it.
There is a subtle difference between knowing what river is and knowing how to get to the other bank.
One could say the same for a plethora of programming languages some research is needed and we don't have to resort to extreme cases.

Out of the top of my head:

- There is the Python 2.7/3.X situation still going on, then there are the several distributions of python.

- GNU's R has a similar problem

- Installing gcc on windows was (perhaps still is) a confusing mess for a newcomer.

IMO I did not find installing clojure any harder than installing Scala for instance, and yet I have never heard (anecdotal, I know) complaining about Scala.

The user above mentioned that for _them_ the installation experience of a programming language matters a lot, and that they found the installation experience of Janet superior to Clojure.

You might not share that users preference of caring about the installation experience of a PL, but arguing that this user's preference is somehow unfair because many other languages also have bad installation experiences makes absolutely no sense.

the comparison was to Janet, not Python, R, C or Scala
Isn't GCC on Windows just unzipping a zip file and adding that location to path?