Comment by everforward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by everforward | Hacker News Reader

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Are you worried because it’s not a mainstream language and coworkers may not know it, or are you worried about the language itself getting abandoned or being bad or such?

I’ve not used it in production, but I’ve shipped a few side projects and stuff for family members in it. ClojureScripts React wrapper, Reagent, honestly makes more sense to me than React does. I used Hiccup to generate HTML, and your components are just functions within Hiccups DSL (which is really just lists) and it ends up looking incredibly clean. Static things look static, dynamic things are obviously so, and it felt much less magic than regular React.

The only things I found that felt bad were trying to use non-functional components I found on NPM. It’s not a deal breaker, but the code was ugly. Nothing I couldn’t fix with a wrapper, but some JS libraries are heinously ugly in cljs by default.

A big reason why react in clojure can make more sense than react itself is because clojure is much more declarative than JavaScript. There's been a lot of work done on the react end to fix that but the mismatch will always be there.

The type of code you're writing isn't special, it's the way people have written lots of clojure programs for over a decade.

Totally agree. I also think Clojures relative lack of support for custom types leads to elegant APIs.

It’s a breath of fresh air that practically every DSL takes either lists or maps so I can use very similar patterns to build their input rather than “every API wants me to method chain their custom types so every API needs its own special helpers library for common patterns”.

I never realized how much I hate classes until Clojure.

Have you tried typed Clojure? Curious about opinions on that vs having Malli do runtime validation. I tried it when I was a total noob and got overwhelmed. I feel like I have just enough context now to try again, and not sure if it’s nice or the overhead is so high it’s a boondoggle

> Static things look static, dynamic things are obviously so, and it felt much less magic than regular React.

Yes! The moment for me was when React introduced their notorious useEffect/useState hooks API. It immediately jumped out to me as the wrong API, by making static things dynamic. Reagent was really a breath of fresh air. Reagent was a really nice API, though it somewhat encouraged inefficient code.

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