I have been looking at functional languages for frontend. But, I guess I am one of those people who just can't unsee the parentheses in lisp languages .
How does clojurescript compare to elm/purescript ?
How does clojurescript compare to elm/purescript ?
Then I ask if they've seen Python before, to which most say 'yes', and I say, 'there you go, it's Python now'. And I can immediately see the look of surprise when they see that _similarity_, because the similarity is then hard to unsee!
I recommend that trick to any others trying to open minds and challenge preconceived notions in their surroundings. :-)
Side note: I've made the point that nested SQL expressions have many nested parens, too, which we've all done. And that the sum of parens+brackets+braces is similar to other languages, just the distribution is different. Neither of those 2 arguments work as well -- I guess because it's not visual and striking?
This approach reminds me of when people say, hey JS has classes and constructors just like Java does! And then proceed to write Java in JS.
So basically I'd do any serious development with Clojurescript. Elm is a really cool thing with a small community that's fun to mess around with.
Not only that but having a single source of truth for your app's state, using only pure functions and non-stateful components to render your view allows you to do things like:
- build a time traveling debugger
- serialize your app's state and store it in your session so that users see exactly the same view when they log back in
- trivially do server side rendering
GraphQL doesn't mean moving to stateful components, it's just a nicer way to have a singleton data store because instead of chunking and passing a map around, components can declare which data they need. In that system components are still read only, and dispatch to external pure functions.
David Nolen does a great job talking about the trade offs and the evolution of everything in this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByNs9TG30E8& I highly recommend it!
Clojurescript is a Lisp with dynamic typing, Elm/Purescript are ML dialects where (static) typing is much more important, in Purescript more so than Elm.
I think Elm is interesting because it takes a rather uncompromising FRP approach to web development. Clojurescript does not strive for the same degree of functional fundamentalism.
Additionally, I find that algebraic data types are by far the most natural and complete way to model your data and pattern matching is a powerful way to write succinct and readable code that manipulates that data. The fact that Lisps don't normally come with ADTs (incl. clojure) is a real shame.
PureScript got its own Hoogle [2] recently. It lets you search for functions by stating their argument and result types. This has worked far better for me than any IntelliSense, and its miles ahead compared to rummaging through the docs of a dynamic language hoping to hit a jackpot.
Although the community is small, the speed at which the language and its libraries are moving is quite amazing. For the cases where a package doesn't yet exist, its very easy to write FFI bindings to an existing JS library
On the minus side, there is no "template purescript" yet, and generic deriving is WIP, so some things (like JSON serialization) are still a bit more tedious than absolutely necessary.
The efficiency of the generated code may also be a concern. For example, currying is implemented in such a way that a function call with 3 arguments always generates both the result and 2 temporary JS closures. This can be very costly in certain situations. I find that library documentation is also sometimes lacking, however types and typeclasses do help with that somewhat (the latter only once you learn what each typeclass means).
Finally, something to keep in mind if coming from JavaScript: unless you know Haskell the learning curve for PureScript is far steeper than ClojureScript. Its about as steep as Haskell's. There is a great book available to help with that [3], and almost all of the the knowledge gained there will easily transfer to Haskell. Since PureScript compiles to readable JS, looking at the compiled code made it much easier for me to understand the mechanics of certain features (Eff <-> thunks in particular was quite a revelation) which in turn helped me understand those features
I haven't used ClojureScript much, but it does seem to have more mature, battle-tested persistent data structures (vs purescript-maps) and UI library (om vs purescript-halogen, although halogen seems very promising). There is also a type system (core.typed) which while not as principled as PureScript's, its still amazingly expressive - and since its gradual, you can start fully dynamic and then add types whenever you feel like doing that to parts of the codebase.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3e10ea/til_instant... - last paragraph also applies to PureScript
Was going to say Shen does, but then again I only see pattern matching. Anyway, you might want to check it out:
I do agree purescript is awesome though :)