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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

This is actually great, and I predict that fans of nil-punning will rapidly discover the joys of actually having errors trigger where the error was introduced rather than propagating through the program.

Any news on ClojureScript gaining the feature?

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Working on it :)

Amazing! What are the most interesting areas for ClojureScript in the future, if you don't mind me asking for some casual semi-serious prediction?

Thanks for everything you've done for Clojure and ClojureScript, I'd surely have dropped programming as a whole if I didn't discover Clojure and ClojureScript at the time I did.

Honestly what's mostly at the forefront of my mind is greatly improving the documentation around ClojureScript as well as our fork of Google Closure Library (GCL). At work we've switched to DataStar (a single JS include) and coupled that with ClojureScript/GCL - we no longer rely on anything from NPM, to call this a simplification would be a gross understatement. Bundle size is 30K gzipped and we spend no time thinking about our build or JS tooling/dependency tomfoolery.

So less about ClojureScript specifically, and more generally how I think we're well situated for people looking for a way out. The current mainstream practice dead end is bigger than the one that made React (also originally just a script tag include) appealing to me back in 2013. There are of course many ways forward that don't involve CLJS, but I think ClojureScript/GCL and the new crop of NPM-dep free pure CLJS solutions like Replicant are well situated for folks who can see that accepted practices are not delivering enough value even with AI assistance.

We switched to DataStar after seeing one of your vid about SSE. Full ack that calling it a "simplification would be a gross understatement".

Namaste!

What is nil-punning?

allowing functions to treat nil arguments as empty versions of their expected types

For example:

(cons some-value my-list)

If my-list is nil, then the above expression will result in a list containing only the element some-value. Otherwise it will be a list starting with some-value followed by any other values that have been previously in my-list.

Well, kind of. This is the kind of problem that you might throw schemas (eg. Malli) at pre 1.13.

It’ll be nice to have it at hand in the base language though.

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