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Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

Not about employability. You can't really leverage cljs well without knowing JS but I'm sure you would disagree.

I disagree with this. I use Clojure and Clojurescript at my day job and know very little JS and virtually nothing from ES6 and beyond. The only time, that I can think of, that I actually needed to directly reference Javascript was when I was needing to do some downloading of files through an API call. I used some of the Google Closure classes as well as Blob. Other than that everything I need is already in a nice clojurescript wrapper over the javascript libraries.

This is like saying "you can't really leverage Java well without knowing JVM bytecode." Which is to say: I also disagree with you :)

dumb analogy, the issue is libraries, you don't need to read bytecode to be able to use a Java library in Java or Clojure but you do need to read Java. Same with Cljs and JS.

I have to say, one has to be some special kind of "dumb" to learn Clojure, but at the same time lose the ability to understand Javascript or Java. One doesn't choose one tool simply because "they don't know the other tool". Sometimes, and quite often, the decision gets made precisely because they gained significant knowledge in both.

Nah, I just disagree with your treating of both “leveraging cljs well” and “knowing JS” as binary things. I’m sure there’s a correlation but I have not found the need of learning neither java nor javascript.

> without knowing JS

What "knowing JS" even entails here? Reading through ECMAScript's Specification (of over 800 pages long) at least once? Having to deal with browsers since 1998? Knowing your way around numerous "standard libraries"? Understanding perplexing landscape of perpetual changes in JS/TS?

Most full-stack developers (arguably) are not Javascript experts, yet they do sometimes need to write small front-ends or deal with nodejs.

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