For the past more than a month I have been busy trying to improve the somewhat weak Getting Started story of Calva. It became apparent that requiring the user to have a project was a bit too high a threshold to set up. Thus the Getting Started REPL was born. Using @borkdude’s deps.clj I could bring the user setup down to having just VS Code/Calva + Java. Then firing off one command in Calva will bring up an editor-connected Clojure REPL, in just a few seconds. It will also bring up three files that work like Interactive Programming guides:
hello-repl.clj – The basics of how to evaluate code in Calva
hello-paredit.clj - A super brief intro to Calva structural editing
hello-clojure.clj - The very basics of the Clojure language
That first guide has already raised the level of the problems users report with using Calva. Things we long-time Calva users take for granted are now introduced in a proper way. That last guide is what has had me most occupied. It will keep occupying me for quite a while more, actually. I am hoping it will serve the same service to Clojure as that Calva guide does for Calva. Wish me luck with this work, please.
Here’s a demo of the feature and both those guides:
Please help us share the demo video to people curious about picking up Clojure. (If you think it is any good for that, of course.) 