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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

Also the Clojure language had a huge growth period around 1.1-1.5 which sparked a lot of excitement and spurred a lot of community growth. But since then, most of the exciting features have been adapted to other mainstream languages either as features or libraries, and most senior developers I know prefer to take the path of least resistance, which includes avoiding less-mainstream languages and frameworks. So instead of using Clojure with Compojure, it's common to move to Java with Dropwizard, or slightly less analogous, JavaScript with Express.js. And instead of using ClojureScript with Om, people mostly jumped to JavaScript + React.

Edit: Removed comment about Om, since I must be misremembering something. Om uses React and has since the first commit.

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What are you referring to by "instead of using ClojureScript with Om, people mostly jumped to JavaScript + React, which the Om team later praised as being the same concept they had in mind, but with a simpler and better API"?

Om uses React, it didn't predate it or anything. Many of the things Om tried are more relevant to things like Redux, not React proper, so I'm not sure what your comment is referring to.

And as a counterpoint, React just introduced the State and Effect Hooks, but those are both things that Om and reagent (the most-used Cljs React lib) have been able to do for years.

> What are you referring to by

Apparently I was remembering Pedestal. See my other comment.

> Many of the things Om tried are more relevant to things like Redux

> And as a counterpoint, React just introduced the State and Effect Hooks, but those are both things that Om and reagent (the most-used Cljs React lib) have been able to do for years.

These are great evidence for my point, that Clojure has worked as a testing ground for features which more mainstream languages and frameworks then adopted.

I don't think I was clear enough. Yes, React (and others) has adopted things from Clojure/script, but to me, that's a sign you're using inferior tools that are several years behind.

E.g., I used to do a lot of PHP, and my last PHP project was in Laravel, which is heavily influenced by Rails, and PHP 7. Many people touted "Modern PHP is just as good as Python/Ruby/Js!" but missed the point that they'd been using tools with inferior capabilities for years.

Re. your edit, which erased "instead of using ClojureScript with Om, people mostly jumped to JavaScript + React, which the Om team later praised as being the same concept they had in mind, but with a simpler and better API": I’m pretty sure that the coment you mention referred to reagent (which builds on top of React as much as om).

My memory is apparently failing me, but I remember it being one of the very first "reactive" web frameworks, before React came out, and being made by the makers of either Clojure or Datomic (before they were Cognitect) and possibly also David Nolan. And I remember them discontinuing it after React came out, saying something along the lines of "We had this idea before React came out, but our method involved explicitly changing UI when state was updated, whereas React does that automatically for you and in hindsight that was a great improvement over our idea. So we're discontinuing this and going to change the focus of the project to work with React instead." I'm pretty sure the project had a slightly longer name than Om, and was a big thing for a total of a year, where everyone jumped on board and jumped off again. Unfortunately I think I mixed this up with Om / OmNext.

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EDIT: Oh! Just figured it out: Pedastal. Yep, originally made by Relevance Inc.

Here's the link of its discontinuation which mentioned React as a big motivator: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pedestal-users/jODwmJUIUcg/6...

> "But unlike in Pedestal App, you don't have to worry about how fine-grained changes to your App model map to the UI."

That's the part I was remembering.

> "So there is clearly conceptual overlap between Pedestal and ReactJS. Further, David Nolen's work on Om has shown that ReactJS and ClojureScript work very well together."

That's probably why I got this mixed up with Om. This all happened about 4 years ago so I guess my memory isn't as fresh.

> he Om team later praised as being the same concept they had in mind, but with a simpler and better API.

is this in public? cursory search did not return any hits.

Um, Om is React. React came first and Om interfaced with it.

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