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Comment by boondaburrah | Hacker News Reader

"I've been coding since I was 14, and I don't feel bad in saying ... I can't imagine how you could argue this is good and adheres to any philosophy of openness or readability." is like saying "I have experience, therefore that invalidates any experience you might have."

If you don't have any interest in perspectives outside of your own then I can't imagine learning anything can be easy at all.

Since I come from a school where scheme was taught as a first language, I find clojurescript a hell of a lot easier to read than javascript. Half the time I feel like javascript just does things out in the aether with side-effects and I find the code really hard to follow when it does. Clojurescript has a much easier to follow flow for me.

That doesn't mean javascript is ugly and hard to read for someone else.

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It's more like "I want the world to understand code, and I don't think we get here with bougie languages that divide learning instead of emboldening it." Language should be easy, it shouldn't be a ring-kissing circle jerk. Clojure is not on any early learning platforms. There's a reason for that. Children don't understand brackets, cause you know, children. If you look at the data on children learning languages, Lisp and languages like it actually divert wouldbe programmers away. Not something I consider positive.

Clojure is hardly bougie or a circle jerk considering it's focus on pragmatism. The first programming language taught in both my highschool and college was PLT-Scheme (now Racket), which is arguably more bougie than clojure considering its' academic focus as a PL research language.

Zero people dropped out in HS. In college I'm pretty sure you're going to have people dropping out of the intro course for programming no matter what language you choose when it's taught in 60-100 student lectures with professors and TAs that have been steeped in CS so long they no longer remember what being a beginner is like.

You seem to be pushing the children narrative very strongly, as if it were some deciding factor on what languages adults should learn for their own pleasure and what not. At no point was this article directed at children. If you do not like Lispy languages and find them hard to understand, that's totally fine, but that is every bit your problem, not mine.

Let's completely forget for a second that the article wasn't basically prescribing ClojureScript as a omnisolution that we're all dumb for not converting to - it was my opposition that the point is ignorant of 99.5% of the rest of the world. His argument was that is was readable - it isn't. Again, ask someone who's learning whether it's readable. And I better not find you in a thread, arguing that semantic HTML is far superior while you flog for a non-semantic language.

I think you are delusional. Me writing in a blog post that I like Clojure and I recommend you trying it is very far removed from "prescribing ClojureScript as a omnisolution" especially as I specifically mention that all I write also applies in regular JS and React.js. If a friend recommends you try out a beer he/she likes, are they also prescribing that beer as an omnisolution? Because that's what you're saying. Ridiculous. Go yell at someone else for writing a blog post in a programming language you don't understand. There's a lot of blog posts to yell at out there. And I'm sure they didn't consult children before writing them as well! The tragedy!

It's not a readable, semantic language. You can dance around it with all kinds of gish-gallop.

If a friend recommends you try a beer, and you can't read the label, I guess that makes the beer more attractive? okay.

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