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⬐ mshenfield

It is great to see ClojureScript and tradeoffs mentioned in the same sentence. I was drawn to Clojure(Script) by the promise of clean, modular, data driven applications. But I've had a hard time finding discussions about the relative weaknesses of this tool (which would make me nervous about any piece of technology).

⬐ rymndhng

Some of my personal opinions is that the tooling is still kinda esoteric. For a regular Javascript project, there's nothing like including a script tag and hacking on the Developer Console.

With ClojureScript, I found it is fulfilling after spending time getting used to using Emacs, setting up interactive compilation properly (and tweaking settings). Tweaking leiningen settings is a pain when the feedback cycle isn't instant. Oh, and occasionally esoteric error messages.

But really, once you get past that, and if you still have the gumption to press forward, it becomes pretty magical. I've been hacking on Clojure/Script in my free time and I find it very satisfying to make use of the abstractions that are already provided.

For CircleCi, it's the present. Their frontend is written in Om, a cljs wrapper around React.

https://github.com/circleci/frontend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNtQPSUi1iQ

It's much more pleasant to build UIs with lots of different states in React, because you have a full programming language at your disposal. The last js library I worked with was Knockout.js. Having to use Knockout's limited subset of a programming language to do view logic meant that lots of view logic lived in the models.

But the really big difference is in using ClojureScript. I converted CircleCI's open-source frontend[1] to Om/React and it feels much closer to backend codebase than a frontend. Brandon Bloom gave a good talk about it at Clojure/West: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNtQPSUi1iQ

[1] https://github.com/circleci/frontend

⬐ KurtMueller

Would you mind expounding a bit as to why the big difference in creating ui was clojurescript? Thank you!