HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

The best talks and videos of Hacker News.

Hacker News Comments on
ClojureScript for Skeptics - Derek Slager

ClojureTV · Youtube · 9 HN points · 6 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention ClojureTV's video "ClojureScript for Skeptics - Derek Slager".
Youtube Summary
Many people are quick to dismiss ClojureScript as a web development language. "It has some neat ideas", they might say, "but it's easier to just use JavaScript for all that". Or perhaps "it's fine for startups, but you'll never build a real team around it".

This talk will discuss the many reasons why ClojureScript is in fact a very pragmatic language to consider for web development. It will discuss recent improvements, some of the not-so-obvious benefits, and use cases where ClojureScript shines.

About the speaker: Derek Slager is a Director of Engineering for platform systems at IMS Health. He's been building web-based applications since the dot com era, and enjoys building and speaking about large scale systems, browser-based or otherwise.
HN Theater Rankings

Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
Clojurescript's bundle size for real world apps is decent, especially given the power it provides. If all you're doing is a 3 line JavaScript, Clojurescript won't benefit you. But if you're writing a complex application,it will beat or match your typical JS stack in terms of code size.

I suggest watching this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gsffg5xxFQI

ryanlaws
Thanks for the link.
I just finished watching this talk "ClojureScript for Skeptics" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsffg5xxFQI) that laid out the pros of ClojureScript and completely sold me on trying it out. Weird seeing this article about Clojure dying right after, too.

In this talk I watched, the speaker argues for ClojureScript for SPAs because it has: * an excellent standard library (great functional programming so no need for lodash or other hacks, no issues with things like map(Integer.parse), solid date support, etc) * Go-level easy concurrency * Immutable types built-in for a fast React experience (immutable.js by default) * built-in Google Closure Compiler for optimizing, (also with sourcemaps and devtools) * built-in tree-shaking (only import what you use) from Google Closure Compiler * built-in code-splitting (don't import the code for the settings page on the home page, automatically load it when the user goes there), also from Google Closure Compiler

And the talk is from 2015! So there's probably been even more added I don't know about yet.

Then again, in 2017 I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches of programming languages. I'm already playing around with Elixir (loving it), wanna try out Rust's zero-cost everythings, and have finally finishing learning Haskell on my back burner.

joncampbelldev
Also super easy hot reloading with figwheel.

Literally just 'lein new figwheel' and you've got a project ready for everything you mentioned with hot reloading ready to go

The only problem with clojurescript is that it is much harder to learn than most of the other JS framework out there. Simple is not easy, remember?

Clojurescript for skeptics: https://youtu.be/gsffg5xxFQI

greenyouse
I love using ClojureScript but one other downside is the lack of ClojureScript jobs. There are thousands of JS jobs right now but how many cljs jobs are hiring? Tens?

That sucks because cljs is great but it's probably the biggest incentive for sticking with JS.

ff_
It's not relevant how many companies are hiring for that, as long as someone is.

Clojure is growing fast, and a complaint I'm hearing consistently lately is that there are not enough clj/s devs around.

dustingetz
market size is relevant, are the people doing the complaining willing to pay $$$ for cljs devs? I was on the market last winter and could only find $$ (baby startups) which was a 50% cut in rate to work in cljs. BTW I am about to start looking again, contact info in profile
True, but it helps fix the TTFX metric -- "Time to First XML" ;-) -- Derek Slager made a case for this in his talk at the Conj:

"ClojureScript for Skeptics" https://youtu.be/gsffg5xxFQI?t=20m9s

The remaining bit of Java is like "a little piece of kelp that's stuck to the hull, and even though it's little, you don't want anything stuck to the hull" (http://www.tv-quotes.com/shows/the-west-wing/quote_14096.htm...).

TTFX 1: http://clojurescript.org/guides/quick-start

brucehauman
To be fair, the XML is listed at the very bottom as the last of the options for getting your dependencies.
Dec 05, 2016 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by espeed
Dec 28, 2015 · Flow on JavaScript Fatigue
I once tried Yeoman. Angular was the hottest thing ever and I was recommended to use Yeoman to set up a template project. The damn thing downloaded 30000 files into my project. It took a while, but nothing I really noticed until I saw dropbox working for 40 minutes. I just can't take some projects seriously after that.

Anyway, compare your problems and effort to things like this:

Building a tictactoe game in ClojureScript with reagent and figwheel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIiOgTwjbes

ClojureScript for Skeptics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsffg5xxFQI

Notice the modularization section that starts around 32m.

ClojureScript has some very powerful tools available (figwheel, om/next), and the community is working on resolving many of the issues mentioned in the article. Derek Slager's presentation "ClosureScript for Skeptics" is really good and covers many of these topics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsffg5xxFQI).

Myself, I prefer ScalaJS because I already know Scala, the tooling is excellent, it is fast, and the resulting JS is of reasonable size.

Fortunately, it is not an either/or decision. Both compile to JS and can interoperate without too much effort.

Nov 18, 2015 · 4 points, 0 comments · submitted by lrenn
Nov 17, 2015 · 3 points, 1 comments · submitted by hypr
mfikes
Derek does a great job of providing a critical overview of ClojureScript, where it's been, and how it can be improved. All while being highly entertaining to watch!
HN Theater is an independent project and is not operated by Y Combinator or any of the video hosting platforms linked to on this site.
~ yaj@
;laksdfhjdhksalkfj more things
yahnd.com ~ Privacy Policy ~
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.