A while ago I wrote about how Clojurescript was a square peg being hammered into a non-existent hole to complete indifference by everyone.
So has anything changed? Well Clojurescript has continued to be developed and it seems to have lost some of the insane rough-edges it launched with, it seems possible to use it with OpenJDK now for example.
Some people have made some very cool things by using Clojurescript as a dialect for writing NodeJS code. I was particularly struck by Philip Potter's talk on Marconi.
The appearance of core.async for Clojurescript is in my view the first genuine point of interest for non-Lisp fans. It provides a genuinely compelling model for handling events in an elegant way.
David Nolen, while being modest about his contribution, has also contributed some excellent blog posts about the virtues of Clojurescript. The most essential of which is the 101 on how to get a basic Clojurescript application going with core.async. This is an excellent tutorial but also is underpinned by hard work on getting the "out of the box" developer experience slick via the Mies Leiningen template.
Let's be clear about what a difference this makes. At the London Clojure dojo we once had a dojo about using Clojurescript, after a few hours all the teams limped in with various war stories about what bits of Clojurescript they had working and what was failing and why they thought it was failing. The experience was so bad I really didn't want to do Clojurescript as a general exercise again.
In the last dojo we did Clojurescript, we used Mies and David's blogpost as a template and all the teams were able to reproduce the blogpost and some of the teams were creating enhancements based on the basic idea of asynchronous service calls.
When someone pitches a Clojurescript idea in 2014 I'm no longer in fear of a travesty. That is a massive step forward.
And that's the good news.
Clojurescript! Who is good for!
After the dojo there were some serious discussions about using Clojurescript in anger. The conversation turned eventually to GWT. In case you don't remember or have never met it GWT is essentially a browser client kit for Java developers. In London it gets used a lot by financial institutions that need rich UIs for small numbers of people. Javascript developers are unlikely to be hired by those organisations so just like Google they end up with a need but the wrong kind of skills and GWT bridges the gap. A Java developer can use a familiar language and off-the-shelf components and will end up with a perfectly serviceable rich client-side app.
There is no chance in hell that a Javascript developer is going to use GWT to build their applications.
Clojurescript feels like the same thing. Clojure developers and LISP aficionados don't know a great deal of Javascript, they can program in Clojurescript and Google Closure and it is probably going to be okay. Better in fact than if they tried to create something in an unfamiliar language with all manner of gotchas.
But there is no chance in hell that a Javascript developer is going to use Clojurescript to build their applications.
Why Coffeescript failed
The reason I say this is because Coffeescript, a great rationalisation of Javascript programming is still viewed with suspicion by Javascript developers.
I asked some at a recent Javascript tech meeting why some people didn't use it and the interesting answer was that they couldn't really understand its syntax and were effectively translating the forms into Javascript. The terseness of the language was actually off-putting because it made it harder to mentally translate what the Coffeescript program was doing.
Adding LISP and Google Closure into that mix isn't going to make that mental disconnect any easier. The truth would appear to be that Javascript developers are simply not that disenchanted with their language. Clojurescript is going to have to offer something major to get over the disadvantage of a non-curly brace language and machine-optimised generated code.
At the Clojure dojo post-mortem people talked about the fact that Clojurescript helped avoid pitfalls and unusual behaviour in Javascript. That might seem a rationale argument to a Clojurian. However it was never an argument used on the JVM. "Hey Java just has all these edge-cases, why not use a LISP variant instead?".
In both languages practitioners of the language are deeply aware of the corner cases of their language. Since they are constantly working with it they are also familiar with the best practices required to make sure you don't encounter those corner cases.
Clojure on the JVM brought power, simplicity and a model of programming that made reasoning about code paths simple.
Clojurescript has the same advantages of code structure but doesn't really give more functionality over Javascript and still has a painful inter-operation story.
Javascript: the amazing evolving language
Javascript has a strong Scheme inheritance meaning that it already contains a lot of LISP inheritance.
Also unlike Java which ended up with a specification that was in the wilderness for years, Javascript has managed to keep its language definition moving. It's sorted out its split and with aggressive language implementers in the form of the competing browsers it is rapidly adding features to the core of the languages and standards for extensions.
Javascript is almost unique that when lots of people wrote languages that compiled into Javascript the community weren't stuffy about it but actually created a specification, Source Maps, that made it easier to support generated code.
Javascript has a lot of problem areas but it is also rapidly evolving and syntactic sugar and new language constructs are adding power without necessary creating new problems or complexity. It is expansionist and ruthless pragmatic, just like Clojure on JVM in many ways.
Better the devil you know?
Visual Basic isn't the best language in the world, it's certainly not the best language for creating apps on Windows. However for organisations and programmers who have invested a lot of time in a language and a platform it normally takes a lot to get them to change.
Usually, it will take an inability to hire people to replace those leaving or the desertion of major clients before change can really be countenanced.
Javascript developers are in the same sunk-cost quandary but there is nothing on the horizon that is going to force an external change. There may be better alternatives but Javascript is one of the easiest languages to learn. It's highly interactive and its right there in the console window of this very browser!
There's no lack of demand for good looking websites and browser hackery to differentiate one web product from the next.
Regardless of the technical merits of any alternative solution offers, and we are not just talking about Clojurescript, Elm offers a similar set of advantages, the herding effect is powerful. Your investment in Javascript is far more likely to pay off that putting time into one of the alternatives, none of which have momentum.
Sometimes there are real advantages to sticking close to the devil.
Node.js
For me the most interesting area of Clojurescript is being able to write Clojure and treat V8 as an alternative runtime.
People are already noticing some odd performance characteristics where some things run better on Node than they do on JVM, most particularly around Async.
Polyglot developers are a familiar sight in the server side, knowing a variety of languages is advantage for the general programmer. Server-side Javascript is really only for those who are a one-trick pony.
It is still going to be a niche area but it is much more likely to happen than in the client-side.
