I now realize my previous post carried some strong emotions, most of them not too good, and I want to humbly apologize for it. Let me state (again) that I'm enjoying working with clojure (for the most part, at least).
I wrote about the useless (wrong?) error messages, specifically when passing a list instead of a vector (ISeq) as arguments for a defn. After experimenting a bit, I was even more confused: (defn x () 1) complaints about the integer, so does (defn x () [] 1) and (defn x () [1]), clojure just doesn't know how to create an ISeq from that integer. I now understand this makes sense because you can specify multiple arity functions, like this:
(defn x
([] (x 0)
([x] (+ x 1)))
So in this case, if a vector isn't found where the arguments are expected, clojure complains, as he can't make an ISeq.
But none of this matters anymore (to the language user). Stuart Halloway (author of the book that I used to learn about Programming Clojure, which by the way I advise you to read, if you haven't already) was almost to fast picking up this issue! I have just received his tweet with a fix to this problem: clojure (the snapshot version) now detects if the arguments are a proper vector, and if not warns us with a much clearer message: "Parameter declaration arg1 should be a vector". This should satisfy all with the same issue I tackled on the previous post; more advanced users dealing with multiple arity defns should already be aware of the syntax, so it's safe for both cases.
This was a positive outcome in more than one way. Not only clojure got a bit better, but I got reminded of how I should had followed a much nicer "netiquette". I made a public complaint, and Stuart was impeccable to pick it up, hacking a fix and letting me know about it (everyone should learn from him, including myself!). But instead of posting my complaint (again, sorry if my tone was to harsh), I should had (1) ask on a discussion list or on other social platform about this; (2) take a look into the source code, see where the issue could be fixed, write a patch, and submit it to approval to the developers - alternatively, take the oportunity to learn how to do those things, and at least let the maintainers know about it, so a bug report is issued. This is the organization that most projects require to evolve properly.
