What difficulties did you encounter with clojure?

Question

I started building a system with clojure, mainly because I need to use Java libraries. My main problem with Clojure is the lack of proper IDE support (getting it to work with Emacs on Windows was not trivial). I was wondering what difficulties other people had.

Answer 1

My problems so far:

• It was not so easy to get EMACS / SLIME with Common Lisp AND Clojure.
• Clojure 1.2.0 stacktraces is still a mess. It is often so difficult to understand what went wrong.
• The debugging experience is not very pleasant. I tried JSWAT counterclockwise, but not very happy with it.

Answer 2

The lack of "user-friendly" stacks (coming from Haskell, it was like a giant step backward), but you eventually get used to it and learn how to work with mucus / swank.

Still with a nightmare about the days when we did not have leiningen (class path, script execution, dependency "control" hell).

It has improved significantly and improves every release.

Answer 3

bitten by a "lazy mistake."

(with-open [file (writer name)] (map #(.write file (process %)) (get-data))) 

and a "lazy mistake" makes your file empty!

ps: dorun answer

Answer 4

Idea: If you work in a Java environment, you might consider sticking to your Java IDE and using the Clojure plugin rather than going with Emacs, etc.

For example, my setup works great with:

• Eclipse 3.6.1
• Counterclockwise plugin for Clojure 0.2.0 RC1 ( http://code.google.com/p/counterclockwise/ )
• Clojure 1.2 libraries (either in the eclipse build path, or automatically imported using Maven)
• Interactive development using REPL provided counterclockwise ( nREPL )

Since I need to use a lot of Java along with my Clojure code (often in the same project!), This setup makes much more sense than fighting with a whole new set of tools.

Answer 5

Change of my thinking from imperative to functional programming.

It got better after I read the lisp programming book.