3 ms·

I like Clojure quite a lot---for a while, it was actually my main language. Ultimately, however, I largely gave it up because the library ecosystem just doesn'

I like Clojure quite a lot---for a while, it was actually my main language. Ultimately, however, I largely gave it up because the library ecosystem just doesn't feel quite right to me---at least at the time I was writing a lot in it (2016-7ish), most of the popular libraries seemed to have a very strong refugee-from-Java sense to them, as in, very influenced by ideas more commonly seen in oo-land. For example, people loved to use (and, more importantly, bundle in other projects) libraries like component/mount that attempt to implement ideas like dependency injection and other design pattern/architectural concepts that just... don't really feel lispy. I remember trying to build a fairly simple web application with one of the main frameworks and just having no clue which piece of the hyper-complicated and indirect code that the lein template built for me I'd need to change to debug some problems with the database. Alas. (To be clear, I'm not saying this is wrong! It just wasn't for me.)

adamkl 6y ago
I’ve been playing a lot with the idea of just using ClojureScript for everything, both backend and frontend. Shadow-cljs [0] makes interop with the NPM ecosystem a breeze, and ClojureScript is stable, mature, and feature-complete in its own right. Although you lose out on some of the features of the JVM (threading), you get access to a lighter weight runtime, and the massive world of JavaScript libraries (which don’t bring much OOP baggage with them). I’m not sure how viable it is long term, but so far it’s been fun, and pretty trivial to write simple wrappers over JS libraries (when repeated direct interop doesn’t make sense). Somebody else in here mentioned that Clojure isn’t a “first” language, but I think if there was an “easier” (yes, I said easier, not simpler) path to get into it, more people might pick it up as their second language. [0] https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs

adamkl 6y ago

I’ve been playing a lot with the idea of just using ClojureScript for everything, both backend and frontend. Shadow-cljs [0] makes interop with the NPM ecosystem a breeze, and ClojureScript is stable, mature, and feature-complete in its own right. Although you lose out on some of the features of the JVM (threading), you get access to a lighter weight runtime, and the massive world of JavaScript libraries (which don’t bring much OOP baggage with them). I’m not sure how viable it is long term, but so far it’s been fun, and pretty trivial to write simple wrappers over JS libraries (when repeated direct interop doesn’t make sense). Somebody else in here mentioned that Clojure isn’t a “first” language, but I think if there was an “easier” (yes, I said easier, not simpler) path to get into it, more people might pick it up as their second language. [0] https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs