Philosophy of Biff

https://biffweb.com/p/philosophy-of-biff/

by jacobobryant • 3 years ago

49 23 3 years ago

koito172• 3 years ago

It would be nice if Biff weren't dependent on various ad-hoc scripts (some in bash, others in babashka), since it means newcomers to Biff (and especially newcomers to Clojure in general) have to install a variety of tools without clear purpose.

Luminus, for instance, is able to handle project creation, development, and deployment all within Leiningen (a build tool) itself. All you need to get started is to install Leiningen (a single command to install on any popular package manager) then run

  lein new luminus my-app
  cd my-app
  lein run

No Windows-specific quirks w.r.t. live reload or anything else. Yes, it sucks that you have to install a build tool, but it's still a much simpler experience IMO. Unfortunately, Luminus feels less like a framework and more like a template web app with a bunch of assumptions about the backend and frontend baked in for you. So it's not really better than Biff either when it comes to being newbie friendly or feeling like Rails / Laravel / Django.

I visited the "Getting Started" section of Biff and I am immediately met with "install Babashka then run this random script off the internet". It doesn't help that they already use tons of Clojure-specific terminology like "jacking in" and assume you are using CIDER (hence Emacs). While I use Emacs and Clojure, this documentation reads like it's intended for Emacs users with years of experience in Clojure. In my opinion, this contradicts the design philosophy of "what would be helpful for ... those who are relatively new to Clojure."

I'll admit the plugin architecture of Biff is really nice, and I welcome decisions like using HTMX. However, there is also questionable design decisions like choosing XTDB on behalf of the user as opposed to something like SQLite or PostgreSQL, which would drastically lower the mental overhead for Clojure newcomers and even Clojure devs themselves. Although this is anecdotal evidence, most people I talked with at Clojure/conj 2023 use PostgreSQL and aren't too familiar with Datomic or even XTDB. (The fact XTDB 2.0 emphasizes SQL support says enough about the situation, I think). Out of dozens of people I talked with, I met exactly one person who actually uses Datomic in production. Nobody I met used XTDB.

I could go on, but I hope I've gotten my point across about three things;

1. as someone with several years of professional experience using Clojure, there is seemingly lots of disjoint, moving parts involved

2. like existing Clojure "frameworks", it still fails to feel like a Rails / Django / Laravel and feels more like "here is a project template with a bunch of decisions baked in for you". Some decisions are awesome (HTMX instead of a complicated CLJS frontend) and others are questionable (XTDB and Babashka instead of simply using PostgreSQL and Bash scripts).

3. the documentation feels like it's written for experienced Clojure devs, not a general audience

jacobobryant7• 3 years ago

Going with XTDB by default is an example of "what do I want for my own projects?" being the first priority as mentioned in the article--I agree that Biff would be easier for many people to pick up if it defaulted to Postgres/SQLite. My hunch is that building something I personally love is the best long-term strategy for Biff anyway. When XTDB2 is stable I'm planning to have SQL be the default, then those who want to (like myself) can switch easily to datalog. See also https://biffweb.com/p/xtdb-compared-to-other-databases/ for more of my thinking on XTDB.

The main reason I switched from Bash to Babashka for the project tasks (`bb dev`, `bb deploy` etc) is that it allows me to put the task implementations in a library and have Biff projects depend on it, as opposed to copying all the task implementations into new projects (which is what previously happened). This way people can upgrade the tasks by bumping the lib dependency. Some of the tasks also have somewhat complex logic and IMO benefit from being written in Clojure/Babashka.

The only bash script is `server-setup.sh`. I suppose I could rewrite that in Babashka for the sake of consistency, but it doesn't really seem like that big of a deal to me (?).

In response to "install a variety of tools without clear purpose" -- isn't it just one tool, Babashka? I believe that puts it on par with Luminus :).

Agreed that the docs could be better written for those new to Clojure. To really do a good job of this I'd want to do some actual user testing with people as they try out Biff for the first time. Main constraint here is just time. I'm always happy to get specific pieces of feedback and try to act on those (perhaps I could make the jacking-in section less prominent). I actually would love to make a course/series of guides for complete Clojure newbies, but until someone hires me full-time to work on Biff I think I'll have to rely on others to write the beginner resources.

In response to your three points:

1. There's a lot of stuff that goes into a web app :). It's also not clear to me that switching from Babashka to Lein templates + Bash scripts would improve this situation (if anything that sounds like it would involve more disjoint parts).

2. To act on this I'd need more specifics about how things are different in Rails / Django / Laravel.

3. Addressed above. There is a step-by-step tutorial at least (https://biffweb.com/docs/tutorial/build-a-chat-app/).

jacobobryant7• 3 years ago

Oh, also re: "No Windows-specific quirks w.r.t. live reload or anything else" -- the Windows caveats mentioned at https://biffweb.com/docs/get-started/new-project/ only apply to "developing in prod", in which Biff deploys your code whenever you save a file. Reloading code during normal local development works fine on Windows, same as in Luminus.

koito172• 3 years ago

I wasn't advocating for lein templates per se. It's just that Luminus happens to use a single tool (lein) for controlling everything. If anything, I would like a framework that leverages the existing functionality that exists in the Clojure CLI itself.

A common pattern in tools.deps based projects, for instance, is to use Babashka as a sort of Makefile replacement and make it act as a thin wrapper around tools.build. I don't like this because it's yet another tool to understand and install on top of tools.build, whereas sticking with the Clojure CLI itself means all you need is...the Clojure binary on your PATH. I am fine with projects that use a Makefile instead of Babashka since pretty much every Mac and Linux machine has `make` installed and it is widely used outside of Clojure, too. So it is not too foreign of a concept when getting people started with Clojure.

As for your response with (2), here is an example with Rails:

The example app doesn't start with a chat or anything complicated really. Instead, `rails new myapp` gives you a well-organized folder structure, one command to start your web app, and a simple landing page making use of the MVC patterns. The landing page immediately directs you to official Rails documentation for learning what everything in your myapp folder is. When it comes to time to extend a Rails application (add a new model, add a new view, add a new route, etc.), there is pretty much always a "canonical" choice of action. In the case of Biff, there is technically many ways to go about doing each of these things, partly due to the plugin architecture, and partly due to the fact that Biff is built out of independent software and making them synergize for a web app. Does this help?

joeevans10002• 3 years ago

If I can weigh in as a fairly unskilled Clojure user: Biff has been a miracle for me. It's true that decisions have been made by the Biff creators, and that's what's been wonderful. They have been really good ones so far for me. Many of the choices are modifiable... but I'm not likely to do that. I just need things to work. The tools I had to install turned out to be ones I should have on hand anyway. I would have reached for PostgreSQL on my own but have gotten really into xtdb. JUXT has just added SQL to xtdb so now I have that if I want.

I use Emacs but I discovered to my surprise that the creator of Biff does not. I don't see a lot of Emacs specific stuff in the documentation.

I recommend the tutorial project (eelchat). Otherwise, they are really helpful in Slack... someone usually answers any issue in a couple of hours or much less.

What's most important is that Biff brought me was a working front-end out of the box that I could start tweaking right away. When I used Luminus I had more steps and they were really hard to figure out as a beginner. However, shout out for Luminus... it was my go-to before Biff and I have huge gratitude.

I didn't know about htmx and it has been a game changer. This is probably my favorite feature.

This was the first time I was able to fluidly get something going, tweak the backend and UI, and deploy. Other approaches had some but not all of those.

The deployment situation is a dream. It was incredible to have my site up with a few steps. For a less skilled developer like me this was totally awesome. Biff has a continous code-push/deploy feature that is incredible.

Sorry if this seems like a fanboy post. It's probably because for Biff I am one. My feeling is that for Clojure to grow userwise there need to be a lot more projects like this one.

jacobobryant7• 3 years ago

This is great to hear! Glad Biff has been helpful.

olavfosse• 3 years ago

It would be nice if Biff weren't dependent on various ad-hoc scripts (some in bash, others in babashka), since it means newcomers to Biff (and especially newcomers to Clojure in general) have to install a variety of tools without clear purpose.

I don't find this accurate. Biff is not dependent on any bash scripts at all. There is one(1) bash script, server-setup.sh, which you can run to configure a server. It's a 112loc script which installs dependencies, configures nginx, sets up a systemd service and git deploys. I don't call this a dependency since it's literally the exact same thing as running these commands by yourself. Once you've ran it, neither your server or development env depends on it in any way. It's just a handy way to set up a server.

As for the bb scripts, yes you need to install babashka to run them. I don't see how this is different from having to install lein to run luminus apps? clojure-cli is the defacto standard tool these days after all.. babashka's deps are declarativively defined in bb.edn, i don't find it accurate to describe as "moving pieces" .

like existing Clojure "frameworks", it still fails to feel like a Rails / Django / Laravel and feels more like "here is a project template with a bunch of decisions baked in for you".

"Strong defaults, weakly held."

zdw• 3 years ago

I was surprised to see something about the old unix mail notifier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_(Unix)

But this is obviously not that...

jacobobryant7• 3 years ago

Too late to change the name now unfortunately ;)

at least it's short and easy to type

jhbadger• 3 years ago

If you want to go old-school there was also a famous satirical USENET poster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF_(Usenet)

JNRowe• 3 years ago

You can still relive a little of that joy with b1ff from talkfilters¹, with the caveat that a chunk of that package probably deserves a content warning for our times.

¹ https://github.com/hyperrealm/talkfilters

UncleSlacky• 3 years ago

That's what I was expecting this item to be about!

zaps• 3 years ago

You’re my girl Lorraine

jacobobryant7• 3 years ago

Make like a tree and get out of here

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

I hate manure.

Arn_Thor• 3 years ago

I was here for an unpacking of the philosophy of Biff from Back To The Future

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

Biff's philosophy, if there even is one, can probably be summed up as "might makes right" meets hedonism.

shiroiuma• 3 years ago

Why don't you make like a tree and get outta here?

tromp• 3 years ago

I just want to know one thing. Why is this web app framework called Biff? Is it name after the BTTF character? And if so, any reason why?

jacobobryant7• 3 years ago

Mainly I just wanted something short because I knew I would be typing it a lot, and "biff" just popped into my mind.

joeevans10002• 3 years ago

Plot twist!

joseferben• 3 years ago

biff is a beautifully designed little web framework, i was still doing clojure it'd be my go-to.

Philosophy of Biff

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