How viable is Clojure with IntelliJ?
So I'm looking for good Clojure editors/IDEs, and naturally Jetbrains is my first choice (love PyCharm and TeamCity). They don't seem to have a suitable editor, so I go with Sublime. After further research, IntelliJ appears to have some support for Clojure: — available via a free plugin, as they say.
I also try to install the Leiningen plugin, but it doesn't work with the current version of IntelliJ, and:
"This project is no longer actively maintained by me. If you’re looking for a Clojure development environment based on IntelliJ and with Leiningen support, check out Cursive."
Further, the "free plugin" is La Clojure, which:
"The project is closed because of Cursive Clojure, which is more stable and feature-rich and it was originally based on La Clojure sources. The last update is available for IntelliJ IDEA 14."
Cursive appears to be a separate commercial IDE on top of IntelliJ - not that it's even available currently. I'm not really interested in buying IntelliJ and Cursive.
Then, there's the fact that the latest post in this forum is one year ago. (Well, English-language post anyway - there's a post by Mykey123sdfsdfsdf that I suspect isn't adding much to the discussion...
So is IntelliJ really a good choice for Clojure development? (Given that I want to have as little to do with Java as possible...)
John C>
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Cursive is available in EAP right now, but it works fine and will be officially released soon. I don't work for JetBrains so you'll have to pay for Cursive separately, that's correct. Cursive will work fine in the free IntelliJ Community edition, if you don't want to pay for both and are not already paying for IntelliJ.
Cursive has a pretty active community, it has its own mailing list and channel in the Clojurians slack, and I'm around both there and in #clojure on IRC frequently. I guess there's been no activity here recently since La Clojure has been deprecated in favour of Cursive for a while now.
One other thing - Cursive will have a free licence option for non-commercial work. So if you're only doing OSS or academic work you'll be able to get a copy for free. If you're being paid to write Clojure hopefully Cursive will be useful enough that paying for it isn't a problem.
When Colin started Cursive we had a choice to compete with Cursive or not. As for me choice was very obvious as we was short of resources and we also didn't want to frighten people from doing their businesses based on IntelliJ platform. Right now things are even simpler as La Clojure is far from being Cursive (by features) and we need to invest too much for what(?).
And as La Clojure became outdated we are not going to publish it for IDEA 15.
All of it means that there will not be free Clojure plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, and this is really sad news.
Best regards,
Alexander Podkhalyuzin.
One thing - as I mentioned above, I am planning to offer free licences for non-commercial work, so Cursive will at least be free for those users. It's not the same as being open source, but hopefully it helps.
Thanks for all the replies. I guess I'll give Cursive a try, as there's a non-commercial license (I'm just learning Clojure currently - while I'd like to use it at work, not sure that's going to happen), and see how well it works.
And Alexander, regarding "doing their businesses based on IntelliJ platform" - so that's a normal, encouraged thing? I haven't really looked at the plugins available for PyCharm, didn't realize that there were commercial ones.
John C>
If you try to do something like Javascript support it will not be normal as we will compete with you, because it's already JetBrains business. Besides similar things you can try to cover any new niche. As one more recent example: http://www.visprogramming.com/armory/features/
Best regards,
Alexander Podkhalyuzin.
Heh - I was just asking out of curiosity, I have no desire to develop plugins. Just didn't realize people were doing it commercially.
John C>
Given that Jetbrains's products have gone subscription-based and that may help the company with more resources, will that be possible that the company be able to acquire Cursive plugin and let its main developer to work under Jetbrains. This has a lot of benefits as clojure is getting as popular and supporting such amazing Java technology has always been the key to Jetbrains's success. This also ensures that Clojure plugin receive the same kind of continuous outstanding support in the future just like company does for Scala, Jruby/ruby plugins. Besides the development could be better if it is part of jetbrains product to meet high standard of development support and expertise from Jetbrains team. Moreover the main developer loves Clojure and Cursive so much and that enthusiasm at least ensure that Cursive can have the best features ever for Clojure development but he can only do so much due to limited resource and uncertain financial future as show in his remark. As such, it will make synergistic sense to add cursive to jetbrains's line of language support.
Collin, the developer for Cursive remark that
"I'll also have to see over time if this price point is sustainable or not. If
not, I'll either have to make up the shortfall with consultancy (which will take
time away from Cursive) or charge more. I would really like Cursive to remain
affordable, so I hope enough people will buy licences that that won’t be
necessary."
https://cursiveclojure.com/archive/1564.html
Hope that the company consider the suggestion.