Clojure, Lisp and Emacs

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I was about to write that it is painful to study Clojure and Emacs Lisp at the same time, because of the very slight differences in syntax, which are hard to keep straight when you are just learning everything for the first time. In the course of some Google searching, I came upon this post, which I like very much:

I spent some considerable time yesterday poring over the shelves in the programmer’s section of a local bookstore yesterday. Based on the available jobs at the moment, I was trying to decide whether it would be less painful to learn C#/.NET/AFW/blurpz or Hibernate/Springs/Struts/glorpka. My lambda, those things are fugly. When I open a book to find that my simple database example takes eight XML configuration files and twenty-five lines of calls to the same function (with a 25-character identifier (which, technically, should be namespace qualified, too)), I just don’t want to go there.
So, I walked away with Programming Clojure and a determination to think really hard about how to get paid to do something that’s not intensely painful.

Well, yesterday afternoon and late-night were intensely painful trying to get Clojure/Emacs/Slime all working together. Today, magickly, I messed something up in my .emacs file that convinced swank-clojure to download its own copies of the three JAR files it needs and zoom… I’m out of the gate.

Someday, I’d still like to be able to use my own JAR files for all of this, but in the meantime, I’m up and running.

I like the idea of using Clojure in Emacs, though at this point, I am trying to cram so much information into my tiny brain there is some risk that I’m going to end up very confused.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://nklein.com/2010/05/getting-started-with-clojureemacsslime/
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