Why doesn't CLJS count?
But one problem that ClojureScript avoids by virtue of being a 'hosted language' and not having a spec is having to implement its own numeric tower. Numbers can just be floats and move on.
CL mandates integers. Not just fixnums, like WebASM provides, but bignums. As well as rationals. That is a lot of code your run-time will have to provide.
iirc Whalesong (the Racket to JS implementation) bundled a numeric tower that implemented integers using strings).
Not why you don't like or use it.
Clojure, currently is the most widely used Lisp dialect in the industry. Lots of people trying it and find it massively productive. Just because some lispers "don't like it", doesn't make it less valuable technological choice.
Citation needed.
I would bet money that this isn't true. There are a lot of places using proper Lisps that stay out of the public eye.
- Every PL ranking from RedMonk to TIOBE index indicates that what I'm saying is true;
- Clojure today has more conferences, books, podcasts, jobs and meetups. More than any of other language in its category of languages with strong FP emphasis. It is more popular than Haskell, Elm, Purescript, F#, Elixir, OCaml. Latest JVM survey indicates that it surpassed Scala and has become third most popular JVM language after Java and Kotlin;
- Clojurescript is the most popular alt-js choice (if you don't count Typescript as alt-js). Elm and ReasonML are far less popular;
- If you count by lines of code on Github and Gitlab, Clojure potentially may come second after Emacs Lisp (which is almost four times older than Clojure). Other Lisps wouldn't even be near their numbers.
- And please stop calling it an "improper Lisp." None of the authoritative Lisp scholars have ever indicated this even remotely to be true, in fact many have endorsed Clojure. Clojure can be viewed as a next evolutionary step in development of Lisp. Whether you like it or not, it is slowly spreading wide and beyond JVM (the platform it was initially intended to run on)
Why? TypeScript, for example, is used pretty much everywhere these days; all the other languages are completely niche. I dislike the language (mutability everywhere, no standard lib), but it's dominating the frontend world ATM.
I've been using Scala.js in production apps for around 3 years now. Curious in your experience what advantages Clojurescript has over Scala.js. I ask because you often hear things like "best in class" when Clojure devs talk about the frontend development experience.
- "oh, we can probably do this and that and get the same experience...", or
- "give [their favorite language] five to ten years, it'll get the same..."
It's been over six decades. Non-homoiconic languages still don't have "true" REPLs.
On the topic of tooling, I found the tooling to be slow as well. However, a lot of my pain points were alleviated when I really embraced using the REPL for developing. Tools like figwheel make developing fairly painless although startup times are still slow.
Whenever I go back to using Common Lisp I'm always surprised how fast the startup time is by comparison.