ClojureScript for Skeptics - Derek Slager

I just finished watching this talk "ClojureScript for Skeptics" ( ▶ this video ) 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.

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: ▶ this video

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 ( ▶ this video ). 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.

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: link ClojureScript for Skeptics: ▶ this video Notice the modularization section that starts around 32m.

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" ▶ this video 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" ( link ). TTFX 1: link

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: ▶ this video