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This is the strongest argument for Clojure in web programming. HTML (and all XML-based UI frameworks) are just tree data structures, so it's trivial to represen

by kyllo 12y ago

This is the strongest argument for Clojure in web programming. HTML (and all XML-based UI frameworks) are just tree data structures, so it's trivial to represent them as s-expressions and manipulate them using normal Clojure code, then render them to HTML at the last moment, instead of having to use different syntax to inject code into templates. Lisp/Scheme languages are uniquely well-suited to the problem domain.

__david__ 12y ago
But lisp/Clojure actually holds no real advantage in this area. Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, etc. all have built in lists and list-of-lists (ie, trees). They all have map, filter, etc. to manipulate their native lists and hashes/objects/maps in similar ways to lisp/Clojure. http://jsml.org http://jsml.org is just one example (Javascript). I know similar things exist in Perl and I'm sure Ruby and Python have them as well. If not, it's literally something you can write in a couple hours.
- kyllo 12y ago
  Thanks for the link, that is interesting. While I don't doubt that it's possible to create something similar to https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup in Ruby and Python as well, I am not aware of existing libraries for it and it's definitely not considered the "idiomatic" way to generate HTML in those languages. They both skew heavily toward template languages that are some variation on <div>{{foo.bar}}</div> and require special syntax, which in turn requires editor support for syntax highlighting and such. And Javascript has been the same way until recently--Angular and Ember are template-based by default. And while JSML looks pretty good, I think the other alternative Javascript is trending toward is the JSX approach taken by React, which is basically just backwards templating, and requires a precompiler pass. Meanwhile with Clojure, because it's homoiconic (code is data and data is code), all you need to implement a DSL for generating HTML is basic functions and macros (which are just functions that process your source code), no special new syntax is necessary. In fact if browsers used Clojure (or any other Lisp/Scheme dialect) as their native scripting language, there'd be no reason for HTML, XML, JSON, or CSS to exist at all in the first place. They could all just be code.

by kyllo 12y ago

__david__ 12y ago

But lisp/Clojure actually holds no real advantage in this area. Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, etc. all have built in lists and list-of-lists (ie, trees). They all have map, filter, etc. to manipulate their native lists and hashes/objects/maps in similar ways to lisp/Clojure. http://jsml.org http://jsml.org is just one example (Javascript). I know similar things exist in Perl and I'm sure Ruby and Python have them as well. If not, it's literally something you can write in a couple hours.

kyllo 12y ago
Thanks for the link, that is interesting. While I don't doubt that it's possible to create something similar to https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup in Ruby and Python as well, I am not aware of existing libraries for it and it's definitely not considered the "idiomatic" way to generate HTML in those languages. They both skew heavily toward template languages that are some variation on <div>{{foo.bar}}</div> and require special syntax, which in turn requires editor support for syntax highlighting and such. And Javascript has been the same way until recently--Angular and Ember are template-based by default. And while JSML looks pretty good, I think the other alternative Javascript is trending toward is the JSX approach taken by React, which is basically just backwards templating, and requires a precompiler pass. Meanwhile with Clojure, because it's homoiconic (code is data and data is code), all you need to implement a DSL for generating HTML is basic functions and macros (which are just functions that process your source code), no special new syntax is necessary. In fact if browsers used Clojure (or any other Lisp/Scheme dialect) as their native scripting language, there'd be no reason for HTML, XML, JSON, or CSS to exist at all in the first place. They could all just be code.