Installing Clojure, because of its dependence on Java and plethora of IDEs, is a major pain in my experience. I have tried several times and usually just give up because I find it difficult to get up and running with a simple project that allows me to write code. I don’t understand the seemingly complicated project systems.
It takes literally just a few minutes to download, install, and get going with Racket, Elixir, and F#. It’s the main reason I have not got into Clojure yet, despite trying.
Yep your experience is (sadly) not even remotely unusual, and Cognitect have repeatedly demonstrated that they don’t care about this issue (which will come back to bite them as the community stagnates).
The “best” advice I have for Clojure beginners is to follow this guide: https://calva.io/get-started-with-clojure/, which will ultimately land you in a solid VSCode-based IDE environment for Clojure.
That’s not how I personally like to approach a new language mind you (REPL from the command line plz), but I’ve pretty much given up trying to get Clojure beginners started there as there are just too many moving parts that can go wrong, and unjustifiable frictions.
I think it's just bad online tutorials and guides. It's not any more complicated in practice than any other language I've tried, maybe with the caveat that getting a REPL running and connected is more work than an only static analysis based IDE.
It takes literally just a few minutes to download, install, and get going with Racket, Elixir, and F#. It’s the main reason I have not got into Clojure yet, despite trying.