ClojureScript beginners' home page

by jiyinyiyong • 8 years ago

191 79 8 years ago

I find the random sample snippet of code at the top of the page quite confusing. The first time it loaded it was about threading macros and the second time was reagent, both of which are things I wouldn’t expect a beginner to be familiar with. Perhaps some context would be nice. Even better, how about a snippet of code in cljs showing how people can do something they’re familiar with in JS?

kimi2• 8 years ago

Agreed. Consider also that for someone who does not know anything about Clojure, it looks alien enough.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

Does the first paragraph the page help? I was expecting this paragraph telling people what ClojureScript is.

Clojure is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. Clojure is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on functional programming. ClojureScript is a compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

I put some random snippet gathered from the community about all the features ClojureScript supports. This page is not targeting JavaScript developers alone. It's visited by many Clojure and ClojureScript developers. And I want to exhibit more on what ClojureScript is capable and the beauty of the code.

I was trying to ask what are the best snippet we should display. But it turned out we didn't reach a conclusion, not even close. https://clojureverse.org/t/which-piece-of-code-do-you-think-...

BTW what's your background? What do you refer to by "something they are familiar with in JS"?

spinningarrow2• 8 years ago

On the whole, great work! Something like this is definitely needed to make cljs more approachable.

Sawamara4• 8 years ago

I could not get leiningen to install under Win10 a week ago, was quite a sobering experience. Some site that was linked to download from got a 404, then I got directed towards some bat script, which complained about HTTPS certification issues (lol)?

Took less than 5 minutes under a linux server though, so thats something, I guess. But still, its kinda mind-blowing how much Win users are ignored.

holtalanm5• 8 years ago

i really don't see the point of developing anything java-related on windows.

then again, I'm probably just being oblivious.

cutler4• 8 years ago

Fine if you have the option. I shared a house with a Java developer for a corporate bank and he didn't have the choice. His laptop had to be able to log into the corporate intranet and serve as his sole development environment. There are millions of Java developers using Windows so what's your point?

pjmlp• 8 years ago

Let me put it this way, Java is OS agnostic and my laptop just works.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

I saw David adding commands that Windows users need in the docs. Personally I don't like treating Windows users like how I treated Linux/macOS users. You chose Windows, you chose the hard way, you have to figure it out on you own.

Post your question to http://clojureverse.org/ see if others can help.

tmountain• 8 years ago

This kind of thinking is not helpful in maximizing adoption for any technology, period.

fsloth• 8 years ago

"You chose Windows, you chose the hard way, you have to figure it out on you own."

I don't understand this adversial positioning.

If most open source software treats windows as a first class citizen among supported platforms then surely the project that does not follow this suit is the odd man out .. not the users who use windows as their computational substrate.

nxrabl• 8 years ago

Personally I don't like treating Windows users like how I treated Linux/macOS users. You chose Windows, you chose the hard way, you have to figure it out on you own.

I dunno if you're trolling here (and if so, well done), but this attitude really gets under my skin. Excuse me for ranting at you, but I need to get this off my chest.

I think that this attitude is harmful to open source projects, and to projects of all kinds. In my experience, the people who use Windows usually haven't 'chosen' Windows; that decision was made for them by bureaucracy or money or time.

I go to a state university in a metro area, and roughly 90% of the people in my CS program use Windows. These kids have part-time jobs and families who need them. They commute over an hour each way to get to school, because they can't afford rent in the city. They don't have the cash to drop on a Mac. A lot of them are still on their first laptop, which they got back in high school, chosen for them by well-meaning parents with no clue about arcana like driver compatibility. It's probably got a smallish HDD, or a tiny SSD, barely enough space for a VM and Visual Studio (which, by the way, a mandatory class requires). This laptop is their primary and only computer, and it runs Windows. Maybe it'd run Linux too, if you didn't mess up the install. You wanna toss those dice with your only tool for getting your homework done on time?

And the intrepid few who do slap Linux on their computer pay for it, with their time. Every single Linux User Group meeting we have someone who comes in asking how to set up their laptop with the school wifi. These are smart people, often with graduate degrees, who struggle with wpa-supplicant et al; and we aren't even talking Arch here, just as many issues come up with Ubuntu. Windows Just Works (TM), in a way that Linux doesn't, and probably never will (and even really probably shouldn't). Linux may be free as in freedom, but it's not free as in beer, not if time is money.

So this is just one subset of the people you're targeting when you support the 82% [0] of computer users who use Windows. And I understand completely that Windows is a deeply unfun system to support. But supporting Windows is going to open up all kinds of contributors from nontraditional backgrounds to your project. Studies show that diverse teams are more creative [1] and, in a business context, more profitable [2]. (Side note: looking at that Wikipedia page, maybe it's time to support a first-class IDE for Android?)

These are the users you most desperately want to attract to your project, the ones who think differently than you do, who come from different backgrounds and whose ideas are shaped by different experiences than you. There are all kinds of initiatives going on right now (LLVM, for example [3]) to attract a more diverse open source developer base, and I think that's great. Supporting Windows is one more way to achieve that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-p...

[2] https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/media/news/articl...

[3] http://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/international-womens-day-celebr...

LandR2• 8 years ago

I have this exact same problem!

Did you resolve it under windows?

I tried changing the .bat file as suggested and manually putting the zip in a folder, still no luck.

Sawamara4• 8 years ago

I could not, I just went to the AWS solution instead. Maybe someone solved this and posts it here :D

m__• 8 years ago

It‘s a bug in the lein.bat install script. You can fix it by downloading lein.bat and applying the diff in the first comment here: https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/issues/2412

Hupriene• 8 years ago

It's been a while since I've worked with ClojureScript. I was excited to learn about lumo. Thanks.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

Make sure you also know the goodies in shadow-cljs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16866085

holtalanm5• 8 years ago

I've been learning Clojure and ClojureScript in my spare time. I can honestly say that one thing that would make adoption a lot more wide-spread is a better way to include NPM modules in the project.

I know that there is a new feature for it, but the documentation was a little cryptic. Ended up just adding some CLJSJS dependencies to my project and giving up on using the NPM module I _really_ wanted to use.

In the end, that could be because i'm just lazy, though. I'd love to hear what others think on this topic.

typon2• 8 years ago

Been working on a cljs project and took me a solid week to get npm integration working. The documentation is either wrong or incomplete on both the official site and the wikis for lein/boot.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

Still, please try shadow-cljs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16866085 and join us on Slack.

holtalanm5• 8 years ago

i think the underlying problem is that the documentation is incomplete and/or outright incorrect.

CLJSJS was a life-saver for me, at least.

puredanger• 8 years ago

It's helpful to post doc problems / questions on the clojurescript-site issues so that it can be improved.

https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript-site/issues

bhurlow• 8 years ago

Support for NPM modules out of the box is a hot topic in the cljs community, imo things have greatly improved even in the past few months.

Checkout https://github.com/anmonteiro/lumo And https://andrearichiardi.com/blog/posts/lumo-npm-dependencies...

bgorman3• 8 years ago

NPM basically does not work with the standard Clojurescript compiler. I would avoid mentioning this topic around newbies, as it will only result in frustration.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

Try shadow-cljs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16866085 you want npm modules in ClojureScript and you get npm modules in your ClojureScript. If not, then I'm quite sure you can get help from thheller who created shadow-cljs.

holtalanm5• 8 years ago

I'll have to look at that. It may provide a solution to my problems.

Does shadow-cljs integrate well into an existing figwheel/reagent project?

KingMob• 8 years ago

Work on this is still ongoing. Clojurescript had to upstream a lot of module-handling code into Google Closure to get it going, and older, non-Node/ES6 module libs will never work under advanced-mode compilation (e.g., polyfills).

cutler4• 8 years ago

I really had high hopes for Clojurescript but I tried many times to get my front-end finished in Reagent but the documentation was useless. In the end I turned to React and, with the help of a good, detailed video tutorial, I had it finished in a week. Ecosystem really matters and I find that Clojurescript, despite its innovations, is still too bits and pieces when it comes to just getting stuff done. I never thought I'd give-up on Clojurescript but eventually I did.

geokon2• 8 years ago

I haven't found a place that explains the big picture and how everything fits together. Is there a good resource to learn clojurescript for someone who's never done web programming and without having to learn JS?

I'm learning Clojure now (coming from years of C++) and I love it. There is a bit of black magic (lein/cider make cmake look like a shell script) but CJS is a bit daunting b/c it has so many layers. CJS on Lumo on React on JS on the DOM ... I don't actually know what any of those words mean :P

bgorman3• 8 years ago

I would highly advise newcomers to CLJS to use lein cljsbuild, reagent, and the figwheel template. It is by far the most popular tooling for CLJS - although recently shadow-cljs folks have been quite loud.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

I'm definitely one of shadow-cljs folks. We are trying to shorten the steps and paths people coming from JavaScript world to ClojureScript. Figwheel is a great tool, just not a perfect one to people with JavaScript background.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

Hard question. Try this thread? https://clojureverse.org/t/is-there-a-good-resource-to-learn...

geokon2• 8 years ago

Thanks for making that

btw - what's the Clojure scene like in China?

smnplk• 8 years ago

Have you tried these tutorials https://github.com/magomimmo/modern-cljs ?

aaroniba• 8 years ago

You might think from the URL or logo that this is some kind of official ClojureScript page, but it's not. The official page is clojurescript.org (no hyphen).

I don't speak in any official way for ClojureScript, but as an enthusiast, I wish this author had chosen a different URL to make that more clear.

Other ideas to mitigate the confusion: using a different logo in the corner; prefixing the html <title> with "unofficial"; and adding a more prominent link to clojurescript.org titled "Official ClojureScript Page".

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

Well, you may need this one https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/8anepx/a_fake_home...

The main purpose of this page is trying to make new developers come to ClojureScript feel better by providing informations. People in Clojure community already knew it so I don't have to emphasis that my side is unofficial again. Plus I added a link at the corner.

Still thanks for putting down you impressions. But I thought about you option before when posting to Reddit.

resurge• 8 years ago

People in the Clojure community might know that your site is not the official one, but people new to Clojure(script) might not!

I actually thought it was the official website first time I visited the page. (The "Back to official" link is not clear enough)

I agree with the improvements that were suggested. (different logo or putting unofficial in the title)

doglooksgood• 8 years ago

great job, it’s pretty hard to sell clojurescript withoit any context(I mean, somebody tell you his success story or explain why it is good). To make who comes here adopt on clojurescript, I think this page should have some links on sucess story or open source applications. And it will be more attractive if it has more logos here, instead of plan text links IMO.

jiyinyiyong23• 8 years ago

Thanks. The official sites might be the better place doing that. I'll see what I can do on my side as well.

stojano2• 8 years ago

Still figuring out the keybindings for spacemacs... after mastering it, I'll have a look at Clojure & ClojureScript. CU in 2020

stojano2• 8 years ago

Kidding... easy start documentation for it is really needed

achikin• 8 years ago

You could try Cursive - a plug-in for Inellij Idea. Unfortunately most tutorials suggest emacs, which is not very good for quick start.

CodeArtisan• 8 years ago

Nightcode, Nightlight, Nightcoders are programming environments specifically made for clojure/clojurescript.

http://nightcoders.net/ https://sekao.net/nightlight/ https://sekao.net/nightcode/

philbo• 8 years ago

Is it possible to develop CLJS without needing the JVM yet?

ClojureScript beginners' home page

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