Developer here. We wrote Maria 6 years ago, and this fall I accepted a ClojuristsTogether grant to bring it back into active development. We hope to simplify/modernize the codebase to make it something people can hack on top of to add features & apply to new use-cases.<p>Repo: <a href="https://github.com/mhuebert/maria" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mhuebert/maria</a><p>ClojureD talk introducing Maria: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBHrS4ZzO4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUBHrS4ZzO4</a><p>Description of 2022 grant work: <a href="http://blog.maria.cloud/2022/09/30/Maria-and-Clojurists-Together.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.maria.cloud/2022/09/30/Maria-and-Clojurists-Toge...</a><p>I'll be posting updates to twitter, @mhuebert.<p>Happy to answer any questions / hear ideas for improvement & extension.
This is really fantastic!<p>I've always felt like the lisp family could be a potentially killer educational language, with clojure being a good pick for its focus on functional ideas while being a bit more concise (and practical (looking at scheme)) than some other lisps.<p>Typically, most programmers start out with an imperative language and then eventually learn a functional language. I've wondered what it would be like to learn programming from scratch starting from key functional concepts like lists, map/fold/filter, recursion, and first class functions.<p>This kind of drawing program also has the benefit of making it simpler to explain some of the benefits of lisp-like languages specifically, in the sense of "wow i'm typing s-exps of the same structure a whole lot, I wonder if i could make it more elegant to type some how" -> macros.<p>Clojure has one of the heavier installation procedures, with its dependency on java. Plus, getting a decent repl environment takes at the very least installing rlwrap, and at the most emacs and CIDER. On that note, does anybody know of an all-in-one, simple, repl-focused, lightweight clojure IDE, like the IDLE for Python?<p>CLJS is looking pretty optimal. I only just played around with Maria, but it seems like a really friendly environment, especially the helpfully named functions, autocomplete, and of course the repl. It's overall super polished, 100% already rivals pygame and logo as educational tools which were super fun for me when I started programming.
Example gallery is quite beautiful!<p><a href="https://www.maria.cloud/gallery?eval=true" rel="nofollow">https://www.maria.cloud/gallery?eval=true</a>
This is really great. A zero-installation CLJS notebook would have already been cool, and Maria has that, powered by (defcell). It also has the shape library, which makes playing around with higher-order functions more intuitive to understand than just seeing a series of numbers as a result. It can also output HTML!
Nice since the 4clojure exercises went down, which I had a lot of fun with.<p>* Just found this! <a href="https://4clojure.oxal.org/" rel="nofollow">https://4clojure.oxal.org/</a> Yess
What’s with this new fashion of using feminine names for tech products?
Imagine being a woman, working in an office, and hearing your first name in random contexts. I see how that could become annoying.
That's really cool, great work!<p>I've been wanting to take <a href="https://lambda.quest" rel="nofollow">https://lambda.quest</a> in a similar direction. Interactive tutorials are the future!