I’ve been trying to learn Clojure (a LISP) through Exercism, a programming exercises tool. It took me an hour to get Hello, World! up and running, so I thought I’d document how it’s done. I’m using Leiningen on Mac OS 10.11.4.

The Installing Clojure page on Exercism details how to install Leiningen; that part is easy. Installing exercism is likewise easy, so we run exercism fetch clojure hello-world.

And then we enter a world of pain.

exercism downloads a project structure:

hello-world/
-- project.clj
-- README.md
-- test/
   -- hello_world_test.clj

The README helpfully tells us what Hello, World! is, and a specification for the answer. How are we to come up with our answer? lein gives access to a REPL we can use to write an answer, but there’s no indication of where to put our files so that lein can see them.

Let’s run lein test to see what lein complains about.

Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException:
Could not locate hello_world__init.class or hello_world.clj on classpath.
Please check that namespaces with dashes use underscores in the Clojure file name.,
compiling:(hello_world_test.clj:1:1)

Fine. It’s looking for hello_world.clj. Let’s make one!

I’ve put the following in hello-world/hello_world.clj:

(defn hello
 []
 "Hello, World!"
 [name]
 (str "Hello, " name "!"))

(defn main- [& _] (println "Hello!"))

lein test fails again, with the same error.

Do we get any hints from the test file? It starts with a namespace declaration:

(ns hello-world-test
 (:require [clojure.test :refer [deftest is]]
           hello-world))

We’re going to want a hello-world namespace, so let’s put that at the top of our hello_world.clj.

(ns hello-world)

Still fails with the same error. OK, the thing that is telling lein what to do must be project.clj, and it turns out to contain the following:

(defproject hello-world "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
 :description "hello-world exercise."
 :url "https://github.com/exercism/xclojure/tree/master/exercises/hello-world"
 :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.8.0"]])

None of that tells lein where to look for the source file. If we make a new lein project somewhere, let’s see what the project file is supposed to look like.

Go to a temporary directory and use lein new app newproj. The source tree looks like:

newproj/
-- CHANGELOG.md
-- LICENSE.md
-- README.md
-- doc/
   -- intro.md
-- project.clj
-- resources/
-- src/
   -- newproj/
      -- core.clj
-- test/
   -- newproj/
      -- core_test.clj

And project.clj looks like:

(defproject newproj "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
 :description "FIXME: write description"
 :url "http://example.com/FIXME"
 :license {:name "Eclipse Public License"
           :url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"}
 :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.8.0"]]
 :main ^:skip-aot newproj.core
 :target-path "target/%s"
 :profiles {:uberjar {:aot :all}})

The only interesting thing there seems to be :main ^:skip-aot newproj.core. Let’s try putting :main ^:skip-aot hello-world into our own project.clj.

lein test continues to fail with the same error. Looking up :skip-aot, it just tells lein to skip Ahead-Of-Time compilation, which isn’t what we want.

With a heavy heart, then, let’s restructure hello-world so it looks exactly like newproj:

hello-world/
-- README.md
-- project.clj
-- src/
   -- hello_world/
      -- hello_world.clj
-- test/
   -- hello_world/
      -- hello_world_test.clj

Miraculous! We have a different error!

Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException:
Could not locate hello_world_test__init.class or hello_world_test.clj on classpath.

I think this might be a back-step, because beforehand it was at least finding the test file. I get the same error if I navigate into the test folder and run lein test. And if we try lein run, we get the original error:

Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException:
Could not locate hello_world__init.class or hello_world.clj on classpath.

From the Leiningen documentation:

The src/my_stuff/core.clj file corresponds to the my-stuff.core namespace.

That would imply that our source file corresponds to the hello-world.hello-world namespace. Let’s try flattening out the structure a bit, and returning the hello_world_test.clj to where at least lein recognised it:

hello-world/
-- README.md
-- project.clj
-- src/
   -- hello_world.clj
-- test/
   -- hello_world_test.clj

And it works! Woohoo! (Well, the tests fail, but that’s because I’m new to Clojure and missed out a bunch of parentheses.)

The final contents of src/hello_world.clj, causing the tests to pass, were:

(ns hello-world)

(defn hello
 ([] "Hello, World!")
 ([namevar] (str "Hello, " namevar "!")))