Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

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> Would probably have been the same boost in productivity if you had chosen TypeScript though

Nope. It wouldn't. You can replace "Typescript" in your sentence with pretty much any other "-script" thing: Coffescript, ScalaJS, KotlinJS, etc., and it still wouldn't be closer to the truth.

The biggest advantage of Clojurescript is out-of-the-box support for interactive development. You are connected to your running application. And without any ceremony, without re-compiling or even saving anything on the disk, you can tweak the program without resetting the state of it. If you have never experienced that first hand, it would feel like it's not a big deal. Alas, it really is.

Clojurescript right now (at least for me personally) is the fastest way to prototype anything for the browser. Building things like web-scrapers feels like magic. You just run the program, connect to it and keep experimenting with things until you get the results you want. No other language ecosystem today gives you that liberating feeling. Almost everything else feels too formal and bureaucratic - can't do "this" without "that". It becomes pretty tedious and often removes "the fun" from programming.

So, yes, I attest to that - Clojurescript can give you incredible productivity boost.

It seems fairly subjective. I'm familiar with Clojure and happily use it at work, but I haven't seen anything in CLJS that comes close to the power of automatically generating types for GraphQL queries, for example. With a single command, I get notified if some client queries do not respect the server schema, plus separate types for each response which provides autocomplete and information about each field (type, nullability...) right in the editor. I don't feel the need to reload a bunch of times because everything usually works on the first try. I still need to tweak the CSS but I tend to prototype that in the browser dev tools anyway.

I'd pick CLJS over JS but not over TS.

On the backend, I'd pick Clojure over both JS and TS in a heartbeat, though.

I admit I have not used GraphQL in Clojurescript. However, Clojure has its own type-system. Of course, purists would argue that Clojure.spec cannot be categorized as a type system, albeit it is, and you can do pretty cool things with it.

For example, you can build a suite of specs that denote a ledger - where amounts in every transaction depend on each other. That is not a trivial task - most other type-systems don't give you good instruments to achieve something like that. You can then use those specs to generate data for property-based tests.

You can also use them to validate the data flow in the back-end for different data stores. And re-use the same specs on the front-end for input validation. Clojure and Clojurescript allow you to get as much code-reuse as possible (even though the code has to run in completely different environments).

> I don't feel the need to reload a bunch of times because everything usually works on the first try.

Perhaps you haven't had to build reasonably complex front-end applications, where a user has to go through many steps in the UI. With a lot of state and state transitions involved. I spent several years building web-front ends. Used if not all, but most popular ways to compile/transpile/deal with Javascript. I'd choose Clojurescript, because it makes sense for me today.

Tomorrow perhaps something better comes up. But Typescript today is not an option for me. I have tried it multiple times in multiple projects. "Joy of Typescript" doesn't even sound right. "Joy of Clojure" though is a thing. People love Clojure and Clojurescript, and not without good reasons.

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