Thursday, November 3, 2011

Survey says: be eco-friendly

I included a number of questions on the survey that related to the environment.  For code development, that is. I had in mind two development scenarios:


  1. "Pure" clojure development: these are projects that are Clojure-centric.  This could be a simple port of Clojure project to the CLR, or any Clojure project where Visual Studio support is not critical, i.e., not involving co-development of C# code or the use of big frameworks such as ASP.NET.  Such projects could easily be developed using the same tools as JVM Clojure developers.  I used Leiningen and Emacs as examples for project management and source editing.
  2. Clojure projects where Visual Studio capabilities might be crucial, such as ASP.NET or WPF projects, or just heavy development of C# and Clojure code together.

Leiningen/Emacs support dominated Visual Studio integration, NuGet, etc.

In the frustrations/deterrents section:

#8 -- Availability of Clojure-CLR targeted editors/dev environments
#10 -- Lack of integration with Visual Studio

In the desirability section:

#3 -- Leiningen support for 'pure' ClojureCLR projects
#6 -- Emacs support for 'pure' ClojureCLR projects
#7 -- Visual Studio integration
#8 -- NuGet distribution

Even Mono got higher ranking or more mention than VS.  However, some mentioned that lack of VS integration has been a show-stopper.

Action item: Develop a version of Leiningen supporting ClojureCLR projects (nlein?) 
Action item: Develop a NuGet distribution for ClojureCLR, and perhaps ported contrib libs
Action item: Develop Emacs support for ClojureCLR
Action item: Improve VS integration (vsClojure?)

I'm fairly comfortable taking a look at creating an 'nlein' and working NuGet distributions (though others should feel free to step in).  However, I have no interest in IDE development, whether hacking Emacs or developing VS plug-ins.  Others are going to have to lead those efforts.

Mono compatibility probably has been the most frequent question on the Clojure ML and on IRC.  It seems to matter to an important subset of potential users.  I've not wanted to deal with yet another development environment.  I hope someone will step up to this one before I have to.
Action item: Investigate Mono compatibility

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