Chas Emerick

The best thing Clojure could do for widespread adoption, IMHO, is to build a Clojure native IDE, extended from the NetBeans Enclojure plugins and REPL. This would provide neatly for the programme suggested here: http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/The+Ideal+Clojure+Develo… A language like Clojure deserves an IDE which is extensible in the native idiom. Building one, with the explicit intention of making it the environment for learning and using Clojure, would do more for adoption than any other single move.

There was a survey about this (among other things): State of Clojure: http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2010/06/07/Results+from+… Quite a few Ruby and Python people trying Clojure out (much more than Lispers).

The state of clojure survey has some data: http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2010/06/07/Results+from+… So mostly java, ruby and python people, and relatively few lispers.

According to a recent clojure survey "Emacs ran away with it, actually moreso than I expected, in use by 70% all respondents." http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2010/06/07/Results+from+…

Heh. Or sigh. And actually it was from Scheme to Python and Java. The software engineering course changed from CLU to Java a long time ago and that was fine, but the new course (6.005) that's a bridge between the intro "make neat things using Python" courses to it, that in theory tries to teach the bulk of what's in SICP, uses Java. For that purpose Java is not even wrong. MIT's EECS department panicked when enrollment crashed after the dot.com bubble burst (for the previous quarter century or so they had 2/5ths of the undergraduates (!!!)) and it was decided from on high to change the very nature of its CS foundation and to purge Scheme from the base curriculum. You can find Sussman's comments on this here and there; here's one paraphrase: http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2009/03/24/Why%20MIT%20n… Although I can't at the moment find the sharpest direct quote of him, very roughly, it's a change from understanding what's really going on to patching together libraries. Now, this is in the cause of building really interesting things, or that is my trying to put a positive gloss on it all and my impression of what it's actually accomplishing. If you're a pure CS type this is an unmitigated disaster ("So the reason, basically, is that software today is a train wreck, and you might as well embrace helplessness and random tinkering from the start? Horrifying." Andy Hefner,…