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ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

clojurescript.org

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#32
post #24

Surprised to see Clojure/ClojureScript come up on socials more often all of a sudden. I used it professionally for a few years around ~2012 and like many others moved off JVM and moved into typed [functional] languages. Is the sudden buzz due to agentic coding? Does it rip through code faster with no type checking and fewer invalid syntax errors and reserved keywords to deal with? are we in for a sexp resurgence?

Been coding in lots of languages with agentic coding and it performs much better with typed languages since it basically corrects the agent if it does any hallucination errors. Especially during major refactorings. I have been dealing with large untyped python code bases and it sucks with AI since if it's not covered with tests it's such a teadious job to make sure it did not break anything. The stronger the type system the better it is. Also AI model is trained on code and the more popular the language is the better the AI will be at it. ClojureScript while nice is not a major language so I would assume AI would perform worse in it compared to javascript.

But in the end. Choose typed languages or dynamic languages with type hints if you are going for the AI route.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#33
post #16
post #12

Nice! Now also get rid of the elephant in the room - "Google Closure Compiler" and then we can really celebrate.

Is that something people want to get rid of? Back when I did some clojurescript people were pretty proud of being able to have it used automatically. What's the plan to get the same benefits? Or is the argument that the benefits aren't significant 15ish years on?

No, you're right, we don't want to get rid of it; it's great.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#34
post #6

I wish an alternative to JS for the front end would catch on and be something more than obscure... I'd love to use something like clojurescript, but I struggle to imagine doing so for anything but a personal side project :/ Maybe this is easier to adopt if you're already a clojure shop for the backend?

After reading https://hypermedia.systems/ I came to the conclusion that the best frontend is no frontend.

This is the way. Sure, the line is gray, but the more you can do on the server, the better off you are, IMO.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#35
post #24

Surprised to see Clojure/ClojureScript come up on socials more often all of a sudden. I used it professionally for a few years around ~2012 and like many others moved off JVM and moved into typed [functional] languages. Is the sudden buzz due to agentic coding? Does it rip through code faster with no type checking and fewer invalid syntax errors and reserved keywords to deal with? are we in for a sexp resurgence?

Been coding in lots of languages with agentic coding and it performs much better with typed languages since it basically corrects the agent if it does any hallucination errors. Especially during major refactorings. I have been dealing with large untyped python code bases and it sucks with AI since if it's not covered with tests it's such a teadious job to make sure it did not break anything. The stronger the type sys…

Maybe that should be part of LLM benchmarking. If an LLM can handle untyped languages in the context window flawlessly, it would be a worthwhile accomplishment. I think For JS WebStorm loads a TS file for browser fundamentals and it helps drastically with this problem as well, sadly theres no similar concept for Python. Would be neat if someone implemented “Python Header Files” or something so you can provide type hints for these sort of projects.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#36
post #16
post #12

Nice! Now also get rid of the elephant in the room - "Google Closure Compiler" and then we can really celebrate.

Is that something people want to get rid of? Back when I did some clojurescript people were pretty proud of being able to have it used automatically. What's the plan to get the same benefits? Or is the argument that the benefits aren't significant 15ish years on?

I would say the community is pretty evenly split between people who hate it, and people who find it practical. I don't see many people really championing it or being proud of it these days.

Well, technically I think most of the community in indifferent. But from the discourse about the topic, I feel like I see pretty even splits.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#37
post #16
post #12

Nice! Now also get rid of the elephant in the room - "Google Closure Compiler" and then we can really celebrate.

Is that something people want to get rid of? Back when I did some clojurescript people were pretty proud of being able to have it used automatically. What's the plan to get the same benefits? Or is the argument that the benefits aren't significant 15ish years on?

Last i checked, it needed JVM (parts of the library are in Java). Given there are many JS minifiers and optimizers (tree shaking etc.) avaliable in JS itself in 2026, I do not know why we need this huge overhead.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#38
post #24

Surprised to see Clojure/ClojureScript come up on socials more often all of a sudden. I used it professionally for a few years around ~2012 and like many others moved off JVM and moved into typed [functional] languages. Is the sudden buzz due to agentic coding? Does it rip through code faster with no type checking and fewer invalid syntax errors and reserved keywords to deal with? are we in for a sexp resurgence?

Personally I moved from typed functional languages to Clojurescript and then Clojure around 10 years ago

Most serious Clojure code bases I'm aware of invest heavily in their test suite so yes you can just add a skill to your AI that tells it the most effective way to use your test suite then send it to the races

Some of my colleagues let the agent interact with the REPL and they report faster performance because the agent is not paying the start up cost on every interaction, personally I've been lazy there its fast enough for me

As you've hinted at Clojure does have less bits that get in the way, everything is true except false and nil, the language does not have order precedence table the core language supports immutable and persistent data structures as default

Everything is an expression nothing is a mixture of operators and expressions map, reduce, filter are built in and expected in normal code

Code you wrote 10 years ago in Clojure will likely still work today the ecosystem and language authors treat breaking code as taboo

Of all the languages I've used its the least headache inducing and the most freeing in terms of expressing my ideas

Also the defacto reverse debugger Flowstorm is a programming dream

Its a lovely language if you want to be content

The flip side of that is most users take it for granted and don't talk about it much

There are also a lot of commercial Clojure programmers who do not understand the language and as a result not that happy, they often didn't willing choose it, probably not ready for it, I think most Clojurians should have gone through a decade of noticing things in their other languages they didn't like before using it

Rich Hickey the creator of Clojure does famously influential videos on software but that doesn't mean your colleagues have watched them or care

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#39

fun fact: clojurescript had support for asynchronous paradigm through core.async library (CSP style) long before async/await landed in javascript itself. edit: i'm in no way trying to diminish the value of this release, just pointing out how cool it is that you can get new language features before they are available in the host language by just adding a library to your dependencies. clojure is awesome!

> fun fact: clojurescript had support for asynchronous paradigm through core.async library (CSP style) long before async/await landed in javascript itself. Definitely. I was heavily using it and it worked: a few quirks but we did have async/await since more than a decade. I think I discovered it after watching a talk by David Nolen. Since then I moved to minimal JavaScript on the front-end: SSE is one-way and that is…

thanks for the link, i was just recently trying to find that talk!

re server-side rendered fragments - htmx is extremely easy to integrate with your clojure(script) projects, i found it to be quite pleasant paradigm, but i have no skin in the game so take it with grain of salt xD

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#40
post #6

I wish an alternative to JS for the front end would catch on and be something more than obscure... I'd love to use something like clojurescript, but I struggle to imagine doing so for anything but a personal side project :/ Maybe this is easier to adopt if you're already a clojure shop for the backend?

Check out Mint (https://mint-lang.com), it's s language where everything is built in: small to mid size projects can be built without any third party dependencies and JS interop is easy.
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