I completely disagree with that assessment. Disclaimer: I've been doing front-end for a long time. I've tried all sorts of ways to transpile/compile/deal with Javascript. I've tried Coffeescript, Typescript, Babel, Traceur, Fay, Haste, GHCJS, looked into Elm, Purescript and Reason, KotlinJS and ScalaJS. Clojurescript is one of the most stable and better choices for writing production-ready web-apps.
Clojure, currently is the most widely used Lisp dialect in the industry. Lots of people trying it and find it massively productive. Just because some lispers "don't like it", doesn't make it less valuable technological choice.
> Clojurescript is one of the most stable and better choices for writing production-ready web-apps.
Why? TypeScript, for example, is used pretty much everywhere these days; all the other languages are completely niche. I dislike the language (mutability everywhere, no standard lib), but it's dominating the frontend world ATM.
I've been using Scala.js in production apps for around 3 years now. Curious in your experience what advantages Clojurescript has over Scala.js. I ask because you often hear things like "best in class" when Clojure devs talk about the frontend development experience.
The REPL. Just like with any Lisp, true REPL makes a huge difference in the workflow. Anyone who never had honest and heartfelt experience with any Lisp or Smalltalk, would never understand how nice it is to be able to evaluate any expression and sub-expression without any kind of ceremony.
Aficionados of non-homoiconic languages keep saying stuff like:
- "oh, we can probably do this and that and get the same experience...", or
- "give [their favorite language] five to ten years, it'll get the same..."
It's been over six decades. Non-homoiconic languages still don't have "true" REPLs.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
- Every PL ranking from RedMonk to TIOBE index indicates that what I'm saying is true;
- Clojure today has more conferences, books, podcasts, jobs and meetups. More than any of other language in its category of languages with strong FP emphasis. It is more popular than Haskell, Elm, Purescript, F#, Elixir, OCaml. Latest JVM survey indicates that it surpassed Scala and has become third most popular JVM language after Java and Kotlin;
- Clojurescript is the most popular alt-js choice (if you don't count Typescript as alt-js). Elm and ReasonML are far less popular;
- If you count by lines of code on Github and Gitlab, Clojure potentially may come second after Emacs Lisp (which is almost four times older than Clojure). Other Lisps wouldn't even be near their numbers.
- And please stop calling it an "improper Lisp." None of the authoritative Lisp scholars have ever indicated this even remotely to be true, in fact many have endorsed Clojure. Clojure can be viewed as a next evolutionary step in development of Lisp. Whether you like it or not, it is slowly spreading wide and beyond JVM (the platform it was initially intended to run on)
It's quite rare to see postings for CL jobs, yet plenty of companies are actively using and hiring for Clojure. It's certainly a far more popular choice for green field development nowadays. Sounds like you're the one who needs to provide citations here and not the other way around.
Clojure, currently is the most widely used Lisp dialect in the industry. Lots of people trying it and find it massively productive. Just because some lispers "don't like it", doesn't make it less valuable technological choice.