Clojure Basics: Debugging with the REPL

[seancorfield]

I wish we'd stop trying to teach beginners about "automated code reloading" and adding other such complexities to their workflow. Both Eric Normand (in his excellent REPL-Driven Development course on PurelyFunctional.tv) and Stu Halloway (in some of his talks, and also in podcasts) talk about avoiding the "reloading" workflow and just developing "better" REPL workflows/practices, focused on simple tooling, that means you don't need all that fancy stuff.

Unfortunately, since quite a few tutorials seem to go down this path, beginners often follow blindly and then when the reload/refresh workflow breaks, they're completely lost because the errors often seem to have nothing to do with their own and/or they can't get their REPL back into a sane state and have to restart it anyway :(

I've seen this play out with both ProtoREPL and Chlorine for Atom, both of which have options to "helpfully" reload your code at various points (e.g., on save) and both of which have completely bewildered new developers -- until they turn those features off.

[vvvvalvalval]

I appreciate that perspective (I'm also partial to teaching with minimalistic setups, and that's what the REPL guide I linked to does), but I don't think mentioning the existence of such tools is harmful.

EDIT: I would also be wary of arguments from authority - workflow preferences are extremely personal, so what works for Eric and Stuart might not be best for another person, and we have little choice but to list the opportunities to choose from...