Setup
Leiningen
Leiningen is a command line taskrunner to manage Clojure artifacts and the nitty-gritty of fast development. Think of it as the fusion of Maven, Ant and a fusion reactor. It covers tasks such as build management and dependency resolution. Moreover, it provides an interactive shell called a REPL, which we will use later on. Last but not least it can be further extended via plugins.
If you are using Windows, there is the leiningen-win-installer for a graphical installation process. For Linux there surely is an equivalent rpm / deb /xx package. OSX users can get it via homebrew (brew install leiningen).
After the installation is completed, open a shell and call lein - you should see some output starting with "Leiningen is a tool for working with Clojure projects."
If you do, call lein repl to start the interactive shell.
REPL
A Read-Eval-Print-Loop is just like a command shell but to interact with your programm. The origin is from the steps of interaction that happen each time you enter a command:
- Read the console input as data.
- Eval the data as an expression.
- Print the result of the expression to the console screen.
- Loop back to the beginning.