git<\/a>\u201d distributed version control system.<\/p>\nIf there are any programmers reading this who don\u2019t know what a version control system is, let me just say: you\u2019re living on borrowed time, bucko. For the rest of you, it\u2019s a tool for saving successive versions of all of the files in your project, so that if you make a mistake you\u2019ve still got the old versions available to look at. Think of it as an \u201cundo\/redo\u201d capability for working programmers. (It\u2019s a lot more than that, but it will do to be going on with.)<\/p>\n
But wait!, you cry. I just want to learn a little Clojure! I don\u2019t need to keep a history of my changes and track issues and all that jazz!<\/p>\n
This is probably true. And yet, GitHub is still a killer app if you want to learn Clojure\u2014because Clojure itself, its libraries, and most of the interesting third-party tools (like Leiningen) are hosted at GitHub. And they are open source. And that means that you can go to GitHub and with just a few mouse-clicks find yourself reading Clojure code written by people who know what they are doing. <\/p>\n
Let me repeat that: you can go to GitHub and with just a few mouse-clicks find yourself reading Clojure code written by people who know what they are doing<\/b>.<\/p>\n
Me, I like to learn on my own, and come up with my own ways of doing things; but that\u2019s not only a strength, it\u2019s also a weakness. It\u2019s very much worth while spending your time looking at good work; and at GitHub, good work and bad work both are available for you to look at.<\/p>\n
And then, maybe you do<\/i> have a project\u2014a program, or a manuscript\u2014for which you\u2019d like to keep a history of changes; and not only a history of changes, but an off-site backup. GitHub gives you that; and if you\u2019re willing to let others look at your work, it\u2019s even free. (If you want it to be private, you need to pay $7\/month for the privilege.)<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been using version control systems for years; I tried RCS back in the days of the dinosaurs and backed away slowly; I used CVS for quite a long while, and then switched to Subversion, which I\u2019m currently using both at work and at home. I\u2019ve dabbled with Fossil<\/a>, which is quite nice and self-contained. But honestly, I haven\u2019t tried anything quite as pleasant to use (at least for a newbie) as git with GitHub.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Part I, I talked about Clojure and the need for a convenient \u201cREPL\u201d: a piece of software that lets you type input at the language engine and see its responses. In Part II I talked about Leiningen, a very cool tool that not only gives you a good REPL but also automates many other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1131,"featured_media":2362,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[427,453,454],"class_list":["post-2360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-woof-guide-to-technology","tag-clojure","tag-git","tag-github"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a> In Part I<\/a>, I talked about Clojure and the need for a convenient \u201cREPL\u201d: a piece of software that lets you type input at the language engine and see its responses. In Part II<\/a> I talked about Leiningen, a very cool tool that not only gives you a good REPL but also automates many other tedious aspects of development. In Part III I talked about a simple IDE for Clojure called Nightcode<\/a>.<\/p>\n