Emacs, even

The truly terrifying bit of getting any language to work on your machine is getting it to work with EMACS. 

Last time I tried to get clojure working, this was the stage that I gave up at. Everything was just broken, and so I wrote the program I was going to write in python instead.

But all it took this time was:

(Emacs 27.1, the version that comes with Debian 11/Bullseye)

M-x package install

clojure-mode

(churn)

and then I can load my test.clj program from earlier, and it's syntax highlighted. 

M-x package-list-packages

tells me that it's clojure-mode 5.13.0, from melpa-stable .

I can save the program, and run 

./test.clj 

from the command line in a terminal, and it just works, with a slightly irritating 2 second delay.

I might hope for more:

I remember once I could do things like putting the cursor in an expression and pressing Alt-Ctrl-x to evaluate that expression in a running REPL.

but this will do for now. 

I can always copy and paste things to a REPL, after all.