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by fdsary 4277 days ago
I love clojure, and dream of the day I can work with it.

But do you know why more people get into ruby or js? It's community is beginner friendly. Most texts on the subject of lisps feel like wannabe dissertations, preferably with the Computer Modern font and 5 pages long.

3 comments

I would never suggest a programmer learn Clojure as their first language, because of the enormous Java stacktraces. Then there's the setup involved (Java, usually Leiningen) to get to "Hello, World" compared to Python or Ruby. Just too many places where the student can get seriously stuck. Clojure's strengths (immutable structures, expression freedom, macros, Java interop, JVM) are not relevant to the new programmer.
Yes, the Java stack traces are probably the worst "ugly" thing in Clojure but from my experience the simplicity of syntax (not to be confused with familiarity, familiar != simple) makes it much easier for someone who's never programmed before to start writing Clojure code vs many other languages where there's a lot of syntax to that you simply need to "know" to get going.

Also, on a more advanced note, I've used https://github.com/ptaoussanis/timbre with great success to get nicely formatted and colored Clojure errors and stack traces.

Doesn't have to be just a dream, check out HN's Who's Hiring for September, plenty of opportunities to have your everyday work be in Clojure out there, including our company.