"Vision"

[nusco]

Raynes, I don't know what you want to accomplish with TryClojure, but I see three obvious use cases:

1 - an online REPL for Clojure programmers;
2 - a quick teaser for people getting into Clojure;
3 - a basic Clojure tutorial.

1 doesn't seem either very useful or particularly easy to do (we'd need multi-line input at least). 2 and 3 can kinda coexist, and Try Clojure seems to want to address both - but I think that 3 is a lot of work. I believe that 2 is both the most realistic and useful target. It's also the use case I personally care for, because it brings people to Clojure, and I'm just starting to learn Clojure myself, so I'm all about evangelizing. 😃

So, if you agree we should focus on 2, then maybe we can review what we have and put in some constraints. I imagine the person coming to the site as an OOP programmer exploring something different - the teaser should captivate her and convince her that Clojure is exceptionally cool and useful.

This teaser should be fun, very fast (like, 5 to 15 minutes), and it should show the most mind-blowing features of Clojure, to pique people's curiosity. It's not a problem if the teaser doesn't explain the features in enough detail for the user to understand everything, as long as they make him eager to learn more.

For example, a tutorial-like description of Clojure's types is probably not very compelling for a teaser. On the other hand, showing macros and hinting at their power (cool), or showing people how easily they can use existing Java libraries (useful) - that would work. This means dropping a few pages from the current Try Clojure and introducing a few new ones, and I'm not sure I'd have time to do this myself - but it can be a good guideline for future contributors.

Sorry, this was really long. And BTW, the existing Try Clojure is great already, so I'll be happy even if you have a different vision for this thing.

[Raynes]

2 and 3 are the focuses. 1 isn't really feasible with code-based sandboxing. It could be with system-based sandboxing, but that isn't something I want to do.

I agree that a teaser is probably better than a half-assed tutorial. Tryclojure isn't really the place for a tutorial. A tutorial could easily be written somewhere else by somebody else and use tryclojure too. I agree that this isn't the place for it.

I think we're entirely in agreement.

[nusco]

Great. I'll probably edit a few pages in light of this. Thanks for the comment!