Guides like this are so, so helpful. I had a lot of false starts when I first started exploring Clojure, all due to difficulties setting up a development environment. Maybe due to its (relative) infancy, Clojure (and its tools) has been one of those packages that I find myself constantly wrangling with. Documentation like this, even at the overview level, is going to help a lot of people.

You're not alone.

Sadly, the state of Clojure IDEs is the cause of much frustration for newcomers. It's getting better, but still not perfect. Guides like this will help tremendously.

Not to mention that I started with VimClojure. Trying to get Nailgun working felt like I was using a real nailgun on my computer, with similar results.

True. I used this forum post to help me get started with nailgun:

http://www.mail-archive.com/clojure@googlegroups.com/msg1620...

The other tip not mentioned is that you must evaluate each expression. So if there are two expressions or functions and the second uses the first. You must first run <Leader>et for the first and then <Leader>et for the second. Although this is an "issue" with some Emacs commands as well.

We need a vimclojure wiki.

i think for folks doing some combination of clojure, scala, jruby and groovy, netBeans is the path of least resistance. I hope Oracle realizes this, and devotes resources to maintenance, at the very least.

What kind of problems did you have?

One of the strengths of Clojure is that you can develop in the repl / notepad with essentially just jline and a valid java install.

I worked like this for a while, but have recently moved to TextMate, now I'm planning some more Clojure work.

You can do that... but it is much easier to have compile/load shortcuts, paren-match highlighting, and automatic indentation....

There's a tmbundle (haven't used it yet): http://github.com/nullstyle/clojure-tmbundle

Although the installation doc says it uses the REPL and screen (and ruby, though that's mostly true for most tmbundles).

Yeah I am interested in learning clojure but cannot get an environment to work (this guide mentions enclojure not working; same thing happens with me).

I added a comment to the blog post about my own experience with getting enclojure to work. Here it is again in case you missed it:

I had the same null pointer exception about a week ago when creating a new project with Enclojure. Try opening the Enclojure preferences page and then selecting a Clojure version — it doesn’t seem to initialise this setting properly. Fixed it for me.

I also had to fix another null pointer exception before that, caused by having a Ruby version of NetBeans instead of a Java one — adding the Java module before installing Enclojure fixed that.

Excellent, this does work. (The preferences page is under Tools -> Options -> Clojure).