Mike Zamansky has another video up. It’s not quite one of his Using Emacs Series videos but he says it could be as it discusses the Emacs Cider infrastructure. It’s ostensibly about day 3 of this year’s Advent of Code, and considers his solution to the day’s problem. To me, the interesting part was his introduction to and demonstration of the Clojure/Cider environment in Emacs.
Zamansky says that Cider is the best development environment he’s ever used. It reminds me of the Slime environment for Common Lisp or Geiser for Scheme. You have a REPL in one window and can enter code in another. You can try out bits of code in the code window as you enter it so Cider enables the interactive programming style that I find so attractive and useful.
Zamansky provides a nice example of the technique as he pieces together his solution to the Advent of Code problem. One nice bit is his use of a Clojure threading macro. The ->> macro that he uses doesn’t really introduce any new capabilities but it does make the code a little easier to read. I think it fits in nicely with the interactive programming paradigm because it makes it easy to use what’s already been calculated as input to another function.
The video is just short of 38 minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time but, as usual, it’s well worth watching. If you’re curious about Clojure, it’s also a nice introduction to it and Cider.