Can you recommend a good picolisp resource?
I'm looking for another language with similar philosophy to Clojure's, but with a better ecosystem.
A. Luck out and find it immediately.
B. Get directed to it by someone more experienced.
C. Chase a suboptimal solution because you don't know better. You simply don't know there's an easier workflow. You don't know you can eval code within an editor. You don't know there are tools like paredit or how they'd help you.
For toy webapps, it's good to know these incantations:
lein new compojure myapp (creates webapp skeleton)
lein ring server (starts embedded server for dev)
And here's the Clojure code: https://github.com/danneu/spinners-as-a-service/blob/master/...
To deploy it, I rsync the repo to a remote server, run `lein uberjar` remotely, and launch the uberjar.
That repo shows how to use Compojure for routing, Hiccup for html, Clojurescript, and a few incantations (like `:genclass`) to get it working.
Clojure is a Lisp. Lisp based languages are great.
However:
One of the problems with clojure - or rather with its home or ecosystem - is the fact that it requires a very high activation energy to get going. Grasp the concept of functionial programming, cc/call, macros, totally different syntax than your previous imperative language of choice, and last but not the giant blob that is called Java platform with all the traps regarding project management, IDEs, building, compiling, deploying etc. I know that there are great tools such an Leiningen or LightTable, but they only make the whole process of transition more manageable.
Now, I know that Java is a huge benefit for all that want to make use of its gazillion tools. But if You are not into Java, then Clojure might give you some hickups.
In comparison to Clojure, Python also allows for some functional programming, gives the eager disciple an easy going start. Most of libraries are written in Python (or exist in a fast, a C-esque implementation) and are very easy to grasp. I can not say that for the Java enviroment Clojure has been born into.
I frown at java lingo error tracebacks in the REPL, and to bring a external Java library into play is even more problematic. Any thoughts on this how to remedy this problem without getting involved into Java?
I wish there would be some kind of Index of how to use certain Java libraries from Clojure, or an index of Clojure wrapping packages. It might make life a bit easier.
Finally, I claim that for now, I am quite happy with my choice to migrate from Clojure to Chicken Scheme/picolisp. You can get quite a bunch of Clojure data types from the good package repository. It compiles without setting your hair on fire. And it is really simple, as the language basics are small.
I will keep an eye on Clojure. but I must say that Julia is as appealing to me when it comes to the choice of future language.