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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I'm running my own fairly successful self-funded business, largely thanks to Clojure and ClojureScript, which let me reduce incidental complexity and focus on what matters. So yes, a Clojure developer can do quite a bit alone :-)

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I envy you :)

I can't get my head out from the Javascript ecosystem ... and previously I've done PHP ...

Those two made me think to quit programming, but lately I've found new ways like ClojureScript and ReScript.

After 15 years I came to a conclusion: choose a smaller and better language vs a popular one with a huge ecosystem.

Nearly every compile-to-JS language is a better choice than JS unless you really, truly need something legacy. The exception might be Coffeescript, but even that's not bad, it just add a whole lot. Even then I'm certain you can find a modern language that can target, say, ES3. I've never needed that, so I won't claim to know any off the top of my head. But it doesn't matter, because you could simply pass the output through Babel as a last resort.

Yeah, yeah another build step, but I consider almost anything as preferable to use Javascript or Typescript.

These days all my would-be Javascript projects are done with CLJS, Elm, or maybe PureScript if I want to do something fancy with types (or don't want to deal with particular Elm quirks).

Interesting mix :)

I wonder why CLJS / Reagent is not enough, and where the others step in...

I mean in my fantasy CLJS / Lisp is so powerful one never looks back to languages relying on commas and colons

Clojure uses colons for :keywords, and commas for unquote.

Eh no, commas are treated as whitespace in clojure. ~ is used for unquote

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