How to improve Clojures error messages

Question

I've been playing a bit with Clojure and so far is fairly impressed, but one thing that I keep running into is wierd error messages from Clojure. This comes in two forms: Java errors, like null pointer exceptions and in clojure syntax errors, like missing parenthesis pair. I was wondering if anyone know of a way to get better error messages?

Part of it is of course from learning a new language, but improving the error messages can never hurt :)

Answer 1

Well, the compiler and other stuff are being developed by a fairly small band of people led by Rich Hickey, and if you're a competent programmer then it's conceivable you could contribute to the compiler's development.

Clojure headquarters is at: http://clojure.org

You can get information and documentation there, and access to the source code and git repository...

...and there's a Google Group for it: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?pli=1

Take a look and offer your help, if you dare. Good luck and power to you!

Answer 2

This might help: http://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-stacktrace.

You can use it on the REPL to get more useful stack traces. It's still not great, but definitely better than nothing.