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ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

clojurescript.org

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Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#41

Post by everforward »

perarneng wrote: post #32
osener wrote: 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…

I’ve been using LLMs (the new Deepseek) on Clojure and it works well. The only major pain point is that it sucks at getting the last paren on. There are hooks that will fix that automatically, but I’ve been lazy.

I haven’t tried on anything completely blank, though. My projects have been sort of skeletons where I’m figuring out what I want it to look like, and it’s pretty good at imitating the patterns. Like I write functions to query a particular SQL table, and it can pick up how to use the SQL generation library from that.

It works pretty well. I also have it generating good docstrings though, which might help. Every function gets a “what does it do, why would you use it, what does it expect as args, what does it return” comment. If the function expects a map, the comments specify the keys it needs and so on.

You can also get typing (sort of) by using Malli or similar which does both runtime checking of schemas and serves as documentation of what the expected shape of the arg is. The LLM has been pretty good at falling back to looking at the schema if tests fail because of validation issues.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#42

Post by mercer »

osener wrote: 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?

I recall some documentary came out or was announced? maybe that has to do with it?

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#43

Post by eliasson »

oDot wrote: post #9
timwis wrote: 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?

You should try Gleam. I'm using it in production to great delight: https://blisswriter.app/ https://blog.nestful.app/p/how-we-dropped-vue-for-gleam-and

I agree! I have kept an eye on Elm for many years, I think the simplicity and architecture is great, but the language itself never clicked for me.

Then I was made aware of Lustre[1], an Elm inspired web framework in Gleam. I have done two small projects in it now and I really enjoy working with both Lustre and Gleam.

[1] https://github.com/lustre-labs/lustre

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#44

Post by everforward »

timwis wrote: 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?

Are you worried because it’s not a mainstream language and coworkers may not know it, or are you worried about the language itself getting abandoned or being bad or such?

I’ve not used it in production, but I’ve shipped a few side projects and stuff for family members in it. ClojureScripts React wrapper, Reagent, honestly makes more sense to me than React does. I used Hiccup to generate HTML, and your components are just functions within Hiccups DSL (which is really just lists) and it ends up looking incredibly clean. Static things look static, dynamic things are obviously so, and it felt much less magic than regular React.

The only things I found that felt bad were trying to use non-functional components I found on NPM. It’s not a deal breaker, but the code was ugly. Nothing I couldn’t fix with a wrapper, but some JS libraries are heinously ugly in cljs by default.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#45

Post by eliasson »

mercer wrote: post #42
osener wrote: 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?

I recall some documentary came out or was announced? maybe that has to do with it?

I really enjoyed the documentary, and it certainly made me want to revisit Clojure!

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#46

Post by ecshafer »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #23
timwis wrote: 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.

Building UI in HTMX is such a breath of fresh air. I hope it kills the "React" style big complicated SPAs. Its so easy to develop in, its so fast to run, so fast to load.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#47

Post by [deleted] »

timwis wrote: 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?

[deleted]

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#48

Post by jolt42 »

perarneng wrote: post #32
osener wrote: 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…

The logical conclusion is to use "a Haskell" typed language that will ensure every path is considered to guard against AI mistakes. OTOH, clojure repl, expressibility, immutability, and data-driven nature has its own advantages. Tacking on malli (runtime type checking) or spec (types/contracts) helps LLMs avoid type problems altogether or at least confront problems during testing.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#49

Post by kccqzy »

timwis wrote: 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?

Ten years ago we were writing ClojureScript for the frontend at work. We weren’t a Clojure shop at all. As my then manager said, picking ClojureScript was part of the hiring bar: people who weren’t interested in functional programming tended not to be good programmers and so we avoided hiring these people.

Re: ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

#50

Post by kccqzy »

everforward wrote: post #44
timwis wrote: 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?

Are you worried because it’s not a mainstream language and coworkers may not know it, or are you worried about the language itself getting abandoned or being bad or such? I’ve not used it in production, but I’ve shipped a few side projects and stuff for family members in it. ClojureScripts React wrapper, Reagent, honestly makes more sense to me than React does. I used Hiccup to generate HTML, and your components are…

> Static things look static, dynamic things are obviously so, and it felt much less magic than regular React.

Yes! The moment for me was when React introduced their notorious useEffect/useState hooks API. It immediately jumped out to me as the wrong API, by making static things dynamic. Reagent was really a breath of fresh air. Reagent was a really nice API, though it somewhat encouraged inefficient code.

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