Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

What's the case for using clojurescript these days in a company compared to JS 2019? the project has almost no contributors, no one working full time on it, the closure library they use its from 2016, the friction to interop with JS is still too high and too much of a hassle, they never embraced npm because they didn't want to listen to their users like typescript, etc..

View on HN

You're kidding? Clojurescript ecosystem is so more matured and production-ready than any of other alternatives.

Clojurists emphasize simplicity and pragmatism. Why most popular front-end cljs wrappers are for React? Because it simply makes sense. It just works. If for any reason it stops making sense they'd quietly adopt something else.

Do you really enjoy chasing the hype and rebuilding your app every few months? Have you caught up with all the syntactic features added in ES/TS in the past few years? All developers in the team as well? Or are they still fighting if it is okay to use implicit returns or they are pure evil? Should you use rambda or lodash, what about immutable.js? Don't even let me start on webpack and the plugins.

People often falsely claim that Clojure codebases are not scalable because they haven't seen codebases built by large teams. The truth is - Clojure and Clojurescript are so practical that it doesn't require to have a huge team to build something really impressive and it definitely doesn't require to have a large team to maintain it.

Why do you think Clojure and F# coming as the most payed programming languages in most surveys for the past few years? If I had to choose either to have a team of 5-6 JS/TS devs and pay them 100K each, or to have 3 Clojure(script) devs and pay them 200K each - I'd rather do the latter, because ROI in that case is much, much higher.

One of the biggest advantages of ClojureScript (except for all the advantages of using Clojure that you also get with ClojureScript) is the language's stability. Almost all features and enhancements are done in the form of libraries, so the language you are using today is pretty much the same language you were using last year and the year before that.

I think that stability is a big advantage, depending on what type of client side applications you are building. I know of several consulting companies that are using ClojureScript for their client side work, and they can basically just continue building apps without having to re-architect their underlying framework every year. That can have a big effect on the cost of development.

I also highly recommend that any ClojureScript development is done using shadow-cljs, and that allows very convenient integration with npm modules.

As a general rule, anything javascript does should be seen as the way 'not to do things', not as something to jump on the bandwagon with. I have never dealt with a more frustrating language, ecosystem, package manager, toolset and so on. When I used ClojureScript for a previous project I found it a breathe of fresh air in comparison. Thesedays I use Elm. It's great to leave the world of webpack bugs behind, or installing alternate package managers using other package managers. I fully recommend trying it sometime.

Fantastic tooling, potential to live in the same language for cljs front-end/clojure backend, less code means less bugs than JS, shorter time to implement, higher productivity from smaller teams, stable core, lots of development on great libs, immutability/persistent data structures/strong concurrency patterns get you out of the tar pit, low friction to interop with JS, cljs loves npm via shadow-cljs.

Easier to list the case against. The case against is it has a steeper learning curve and it's harder to hire for.

I’d add that if you are ok with remote and the company is doing something interesting: hiring (or training) isn’t that problematic, you will actually get access to very talented & motivated people because of Clojure

If you require people to be co-located Berlin has a very strong Clojure community for example, depends on where you are though.

Fantastic tooling

The official guide recommends using webpack, the irony. https://clojurescript.org/guides/webpack

It doesn't recommend - it just lists this as a possibility. There's a big difference.

Well. I can only say that now and then I read about new, super clever solutions to js problems ranging from async code to packaging or react. Most of the time that's the first time it occurs to me that X could be a problem, as I'm just happily banging out clojurescript.

Cljs seems to dodge a mountain of stupidity. Even react makes more sense in cljs than js.

cljs + reagent + re-frame is still the most enjoyable way for me to build react UIs

http://shadow-cljs.org

Hello I use clojure and clojurescript at work I have no fear about clojure be small because clojure is hosted. There is no problem to use any lib on npm or maven. Clojure don't need to be huge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com