I’m a long time Common Lisp slime user. I’d like to experiment with writing a closure program which will start as a translation of a particular Common Lisp library.
Which development environment should I use?
The book Clojure for the |Brave and True [Higginbotham] recommends Emacs and something called Cider. Is that still good advice?
One strange thing I find in the instructions in this book, is that it says to use emacs, I have to start by removing my .emacs and .emacs.d … sorry, but that’s something I’d prefer to avoid.
The simple answer is: use whatever editor/IDE you prefer, as long as it has a Clojure integration that offers live evaluation into a REPL. That means Atom, VS Code, IntelliJ (Cursive), Emacs (with CIDER and nREPL), vim…
You said you are a Common Lisp Slime user which I think of as an emacs mode, so I assumed you are already an emacs user. Cider is a different emacs mode that tries to give a similar experience to Slime. As you say you don’t want emacs, are you using Slime in some other editor? Cider’s server can be used with some other editors. See the Cider documentation. I’ve installed Calva into Microsoft’s VScode but not done much with them yet.
No, I’m happy to use emacs. I just wanted to make sure cider is still supported. In the Scala community for example, there was a huge effort a few years ago to get an emacs scala mode working. But the project is all but abandoned now as I understand.
I’ve been using cider for a week now, and I don’t have any significant complaints.
I love my Cider! @bbatsov has done fantastic work there, and it keeps good lines of communication with Calva (for VSCode users) and Cursive (for IntelliJ folks).