Eclipse and Clojure Unit Testing

So far, I'm enjoying my little Clojure projects. The biggest weakness is the IDE, NetBeans, specifically. I haven't and probably won't bother with the emacs version. I'm sure there's things about it that work better, but I'm way too spoiled.

To be fair, the NetBeans plugin is in alpha state. It should get better - this is just a snapshot at this point in time.

As I've worked on this intermediate app, I've had occasion to go back and modify some of the java code I'd already written. Given all the refactoring and testing handholding which NetBeans provides, making those changes was pretty easy.

Here's the world in which I'm living: To get unit tests even somewhat integrated, I call and organize them from main.

(ns some-ns.main
    (:gen-class)
  (:use
    clojure.contrib.test-is))

(defn -main []
  (run-tests
    'some-ns.someclass
    'some-ns.otherclass
))

Because of the IDE integration differences, I can't say that I'm more productive in Clojure. A huge difference is highlighting syntax errors. In Java, they pop up immediately and are easily dealt with. In Clojure, I have to compile before I find out I fat-fingered something.

Debugging is similar. No breakpoints and horrific stack-traces. A good chunk of my code is devoted to logging (which is good and all, but c'mon).

I'm sure things will improve over time. Like I said, the plug-in is alpha. If the language gains much momentum, I expect to see improvements. I have the feeling that it won't gain enough to compare to the ease of Java (I can't believe I just typed that) overall.

Overall, I'm enjoying the experience. I am accomplishing a lot, pretty quickly, and it seems like there is a lot less jumping around trying to keep all the different parts working together.