I don't see any marketing speak, but there's a lot of Clojure terminology. If you're not familiar with Clojure I can see how this could be annoying.

REPL: read/eval/print/loop (think irb from Ruby, although there's more to it). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93print...

Instarepl: A portmanteau of instant and REPL, meaning a REPL that evaluates immediately as you type.

"context for the Instarepl": essentially the namespace in which the REPL executes, meaning that if you run lein-light inside your project folder you can get access to your project's functions inside LightTable.

leiningen: Clojure's most popular build tool and vector for plugins that enhance the build cycle. https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/

> coffeehouse-MBA

?

IMO, you have to consider the audience. Chris probably hasn't had time to build any kind of glossary for 'marketing-slang'. He's probably spent most of his time building the functionality that the new version of LT is displaying today.

The line you highlighted can make plenty of sense if you take the time to think about what each word means. There is no instant gratification for understanding.

What do I mean by that? Google 'REPL' and take the time to learn what that concept means. Do some research and play around with leiningen. I'm really not trying to be rude, but do you know what type of developers LT is aimed at right now? hint: clojure

HTH.

I'm about as far away from a "coffeehouse-MBA" as you can be haha :D Sorry though, the point wasn't to inundate people with things they didn't have the context to understand.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is an update to something already released, and terms like "Instarepl" were introduced there. Likewise, the playground itself is really only useful to people who either do Clojure or are interested in trying it out. The post contains links to things like Leiningen as that is likely new to folks starting out with Clojure, but aside from that I don't see many other Clojure specific things. Maybe it's worth reintroducing some terms every time, but I worry that serves as an equal annoyance to those who've already heard it all before.

What do you see as marketing-slang? And are there other things that made it frustrating to read?

I disagree. It reads perfectly fine to me, and the terms I was unfamiliar with were defined before usage (the "sidebar" and "verbs" for instance). Although I'm familiar with Clojure, I haven't been following Light Table especially closely.

You're apparently not alone though, so it's probably a good idea to make the writeups more readable to non-Clojurians.

You're not the only one. I actually stopped reading and came here to read comments hoping to get a better idea.

> can you include a glossary that connects all the marketing-slang to the common concepts that they represent?

What you are calling "marketing slang" are actually "common concepts". The definition of common is highly context dependent. Here, the common concepts are what is known by a clojure programmer.

> and a lot of it smells like a coffeehouse-MBA >> The most exciting addition to the playground is the ability to use your own projects as the context for the Instarepl. You do this by using the lein-light leiningen plugin. Just run lein light from one of your projects and use the sidebar's connect verb to hook into it.

What kind of MBAs you hang out with who know what is REPL, leiningen, plugin etc, and use it in the copy-writing?

> A friendly (honestly!) tip about writing tutorials and helptext in general: the word "just" usually means it would be better to describe the actual steps to be taken. Think of it as a code-smell or a misplaced abstraction.

So, every time he posts an update, he explains what is a REPL, leiningen, how to install leiningen, what is lein-light, how to install lein-light, what is clojure, how to install clojure?

You just run lein light is perfectly reasonable. Had he gone into details about leiningen, that would have been fluff and totally unnecessary.

LightTable is an IDE which right now is being developed for Clojure. If you don't know Clojure, you are't the target audience. I can assure you there isn't anything in the post which isn't obvious to a clojure programmer.

Yeah screwed up in some renaming. Try lein-light 0.0.4

I'm having the same problem. It looks like we're not the only ones: https://github.com/Kodowa/Light-Table-Playground/issues/13

I'm on macosx 10.7. Perhaps it works better for Linux users?

Clojure and ClojureScript

I'd love to have any info on this as well. I tried learning a little clojure to mess with light table, and I loved it. Aching to have instant feedback from my js too.

It was some time ago (8 months or so). I remember googling around and finding different approaches to setting up the tool chain. The notes I kept on some of the steps I tried to get Clojure working on emacs included the following (not the whole list of commands):

Setting up Clojure

Followed the gist of http://riddell.us/ClojureSwankLeiningenWithEmacsOnLinux.html (no longer existing) The first time, invoking 'mvn2 install' to build clojure-contrib jar failed. Later, after cleaning up Java, it worked.

Java was already installed, so I apt-get installed ant and maven2

  ~$ git clone git://github.com/clojure/clojure.git
  ~$ git clone git://github.com/clojure/clojure-contrib.git 
  ~$ mvn install
  Copy jline-0.0.94.jar

Create a bash script called clj to start clojure with these commands:

  #!/bin/sh
  # without jline
  #java -cp "$CLOJURE_HOME/clojure-1.3.0.jar" clojure.main "$@"
  # with jline
  java -cp "$CLOJURE_HOME/jline-0.9.94.jar:$CLOJURE_HOME/clojure-1.4.0.jar" jline.ConsoleRunner clojure.main

Running clj in the terminal worked, with the repl functioning as expected.

For emacs:

  ~$ sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk

SLIME, clojure-mode and leiningen

  git clone git://github.com/nablaone/slime.git
  git clone git://github.com/technomancy/clojure-mode.git
  ~$ wget --no-check-certificate http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/raw/stable/bin/lein

Execute the leiningen script

  ~$ chmod +x lein
  ~$ ./lein self-install

For some reason, this didn't work in emacs and I opted instead to run Clojure in jEdit. It worked but I didn't quite like the jEdit look and feel. Anyway, the long and the short of it was I played with Clojure mainly in jEdit for a while.

As you said, the setup process was not well documented at that time and it was quite frustrating. I'm sure it's better now. I'm going to play with Clojure in Light Table again, and if it excites me, I'll have another go at a full Clojure install.