Clojure Desktop UI Framework

by ducktective • 2 years ago

277 134 2 years ago

roenxi• 2 years ago

Really could use a link to the API docs in the README.md, it is a bit hard to judge when the "documentation" such as they have so far is sparse. But it is nice to see a newish UI project.

I will say I've found Clojure to be a success story for doing GUI work. Projects like Dave Ray's seesaw (https://github.com/clj-commons/seesaw) are an amazing demo of how one man can rearchitect an API like Swing into something that is deceptively fun to use. High hopes that this project goes somewhere that is similarly enjoyable.

vips7L2• 2 years ago

There's a lot of languages that just work better for doing declarative ui than Java. Booth Groovy and Scala have wrappers that just make it that much easier.

http://groovy-lang.org/dsls.html#swingbuilder https://github.com/scala/scala-swing

nick__m• 2 years ago

the Readme says this about the doc:

  Work in progress. No docs, and everything changes every day.

webprofusion• 2 years ago

Lol, checking out the readme. Dunking on stuff isn't what makes you an opinionated framework.

bena• 2 years ago

I’ve gone over the readme, what part would you say is them dunking?

Like, honest question, I do agree with most of their points and don’t think they’re presenting them in a too harsh way

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

I love this. Clojure will be perfect for this.

Per the other comment, might do less dunking

hyperhello2• 2 years ago

Question about native integration. Does the framework support documents on a native level? Can I define a file type that opens the app when double clicked, maintaining the windows and data, etc?

tonsky6• 2 years ago

Not yet, but in theory, sure

kpw94• 2 years ago

I'm sure Clojure is a great language for some tasks...

But, looking at the examples (picked the Wordle one since I know that game): https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/blob/main/dev/examples/...

I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets, say line 56 to 74 which define this "color", "merge-colors" and "colors"... then the "field" one lines 76 to 117 is even harder.

is it more natural read for people familiar with writing functional programs? (am I permanently "broken" due to my familiarity with imperative programing?)

I wonder what the same Wordle example would look like in, say pure Flutter.

Also wonder how would that code look with external dependencies (say hitting a server to get the word of the day), and navigation (with maintaining state in between those pages)

trentonstrong• 2 years ago

"is it more natural read for people familiar with writing functional programs? (am I permanently "broken" due to my familiarity with imperative programing?)"

As just one person who has written a great deal of functional code, it reads well to me. I think because I am used to reading it "inside out"? Reading lisp-likes is probably helpful.

Take 'color' for example. It opens with a 'cond', with three branches. First branch is if the idx-th position in word is the same as letter, return green. Second branch is if the word includes the latter at all, yellow. Otherwise we're grey.

That took me a few seconds to grok. Just one anecdote for you. Don't think you're broken but reading/writing this kind of code even a little bit will change the way you see code IMO.

exitb• 2 years ago

This is the function that confused the person you respond to, ported to Python:

    def color(word, letter, idx):
        if word[idx] == letter:
            return GREEN
        elif letter in word:
            return YELLOW
        else:
            return GREY

I know which one I'd prefer to grok at 2AM with alerts going off.

thaumasiotes• 2 years ago

It opens with a 'cond', with three branches. First branch is if the idx-th position in word is the same as letter, return green. Second branch is if the word includes the letter at all, yellow.

This is a tangent, but I've been thinking about how I feel when the conditions of an if-else ladder rely on the order they're listed in.

This is an example; if you swapped the order of those branches around, the coloration would become incorrect.

I'm a little happier when the conditions are described completely, such that swapping the order of the checks doesn't change which of them evaluate false or true, but it's also true that that can add quite a bit of complexity over an order-sensitive set of conditions.

Thoughts?

soerxpso• 2 years ago

It's readable, your (justified) problem is with his names. There's no language where "colors" and "field" will be descriptive function names that make it clear what's going on.

koito17• 2 years ago

I use Clojure professionally, but it's readable to me. I would personally encode the color merging rules differently since it looks too obscured as-is. But I think what doesnt help is the lack of types (or schemas) and the unhelpful function names, as described by another commenter.

Also,

  (apply merge-with {} ...)

is pretty "evil" in the sense that it's a very roundabout data transformation and would likely not pass code review at my company.

matthavener• 2 years ago

Hickey talks about readability of Clojure in this talk (timestamp at 6m40s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4#t=6m40

yen223• 2 years ago

It's just a matter of familiarity. If you showed me an article written in Italian I would struggle to read it, but that's not because Italian is inherently an unreadable language.

Zak4• 2 years ago

As an experienced Clojure programmer, I found that code easy to read. It uses quite a few idioms that are specific to Clojure or at least Lisp.

Examples include cond, let [{:keys ...}], for being a list comprehension rather than a loop, #(%) function literals, and @ deref.

tmountain• 2 years ago

Also found it easy to read even though I haven't written any Clojure in about a decade (spent a LOT of time with it when it was new).

dimitar• 2 years ago

Let's see the features used in that snippet:

* The cond macro which works similarly to C switch

* Hashmap functions like merge and merge-with

* Destructuring

* The for macro which is similar to the "for each in" statements

None of these are something unfamiliar to common programming languages so that code will not be hard understand once you go over the initial syntax and idiom hump. The syntax makes things much easier once you get to used to it, I think all Clojure programmers like it.

vaylian2• 2 years ago

Clojure is a lisp. Lisp languages represent code as trees. That's why you have so many parentheses. The trees contain language constructs (if, cond, let, defn, ...), data (numbers, strings,...) and names (function names, names of value bindings). There is also some more advanced syntax for quoting and macros.

When reading lisp code, you navigate it like a tree. Indention matters and clean lisp code has the same indention level for all sibling nodes (with minor deviations for special constructs). Most code follows the pattern of defining "variable" bindings (e.g. via `let`) and then it has one final expression that uses all these bindings to calculate a value.

  (defn name-of-a-function-that-i-define [first-argument second-argument]
    (let [sum-of-some-numbers (+ 1 2 3)
          product-of-some-numbers (* 1 2 3)]
      (+ first-argument
         second-argument
         sum-of-some-numbers
         product-of-some-numbers)))

ulbu• 2 years ago

(i'll just make it clear that indentation matters to users as a strongly recommended convention for ease of reading. to the interpreter, you can write everything on a single line)

CraigJPerry• 2 years ago

> I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets, say line 56 to 74 which define this "color”

I think you make a great point, a point that once someone has gotten used to lisp, is harder to fully appreciate. I’m at the stage now in my lisp journey that i didn’t find those hard to read but it wasn’t that long ago that i felt almost nerd sniped by this weird language. I think it’s worth pointing out that in a more advanced example, I’d still have been comfortable because of the repl - I could navigate between each sub expression with a keystroke and I can send each to the repl with a keystroke and see what they do. Lisp really makes it easy to do this kind of bottom-up assembly - both when you’re writing and when you’re understanding someone else’s code.

A corollary to that, and which was key to me falling in love with lisps, is that the signal-to-noise ratio is off the charts. Whatever you want to implement, probably doesn’t require a lot of code. Wordle in 189 lines is pretty decent. There’s just less to fit in your head and what’s there tends to be solving the problem at hand, not boiler plate.

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

Just don't mention Electric Clojure, because that might cause some head explosions. (Fully reactive multi-tier programs where an entire web UI is 60 lines of code and implements infinite scroll with search and dynamic viewport resizing.)

If you know Clojure, the code presented in the example seems fairly straightforward. Parentheses demarcate the syntax tree; and the last expression in any tree is the result carried forward.

boxed• 2 years ago

The single space indent seems the most weird thing about that example...

diggan4• 2 years ago

I've done a bunch of Clojure development professionally and don't find that code extremely hard to read.

One thing to add to what others have said, when you're met with code like this in the wild and you need to modify/add/remove something but don't have a 100% understanding yet, the common workflow is that you explore this code with your "evaluator" (basically a REPL connected to your editor).

So if you come across snippets of code you don't understand very well, you place your cursor at the various forms and execute them. So you'll start at the inner forms, and slowly work your way outwards, and after that you've verified assumptions both about the function's internal workings and how you'll use it from the outside.

yas_hmaheshwari• 2 years ago

I wonder what the same Wordle example would look like in, say pure Flutter.

Try this with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. All LLM's are really good with this translation tasks

gorjusborg2• 2 years ago

If you haven't used a Lisp-inspired language, yeah, it's going to seem different than all those imperative Algol-derived languages that have been popular for so long.

I don't use Clojure professionally, but I've spent years using the language personally. It might be hard to believe, but it really is beautiful once you learn it, and extremely powerful as well.

forgetfulness• 2 years ago

This one's pretty clean for Clojure code, due to the simplicity of the data model, in the most conventional sense, as the state of the program is just the word, the guesses, and the grid of colored characters for the guesses.

External dependencies you manage like in most other applications nowadays, you don't hit external services in the "guts" of your code unless you really need to, for performance, testability and to keep the less reliable parts of your code isolated, you keep the interactions with external services as close to the "main" of the application as you can.

When things break down is with more complex data models of the application, not even as much because of the language itself but because Clojure programmers actively reject using record types and interfaces, and just pass dictionaries around. You wind up with some code that, bafflingly, gives the impression of being very simple and neat, but you can't tell what it's actually doing.

novagameco2• 2 years ago

Lisp becomes easier to read if you have an IDE plugin that removes opacity from parentheses

freilanzer2• 2 years ago

I find it extremely hard to read.

Having a bit of Lisp experience (really not a lot), I find it very easy and elegant to read.

is it more natural read for people familiar with writing functional programs? (am I permanently "broken" due to my familiarity with imperative programing?)

No, most people who say something like this are simply unwilling to invest an evening into a language they're not already familiar with.

ceronman• 2 years ago

It's possible to write some pretty unreadable code with Clojure, just like it's possible in any programming language.

I can tell you that this code is very easy to read if you are familiar with Clojure. In fact, this example is lovely! Seeing this code really makes me wanting to try this library! Clojure has this terse, yet readable aesthetic that I like a lot.

But I completely understand you because at some point Clojure code also looked alien to me. You are not broken for having familiarity with some style of code. Familiarity is something you can acquire at any time, and then this code will be easy to read.

True hard-to-read code is one that is hard to understand even if you master the language it is written in.

indigo0086• 2 years ago

not going to say you're wrong or right, but learning lisps/clojure fairly deeply you can find worse examples. Also when people learn it their mind tends to find it a very consistent langauge overall visually. I've moved on after a long stint in clojure to elixir and while I like it, most other language pale in language consistency.

dkersten• 2 years ago

As someone who’s written a lot of Clojure and have been using it on and off since 2009, this looks like decent quality code to me.

I think it’s just a familiarity thing. Clojure is different from most languages in that it’s a lisp and it’s immutable-first functional. That gives it a bit of a learning curve compared to other languages, but I find other simpler languages quite dificulte to read until I’m familiar with them, too.

jb19912• 2 years ago

I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets,

And unfortunately, you won't get much compiler assistance either with Clojure, beyond basic things. So it's easy to have bugs that will take a while to track down in a complex codebase.

iLemming7• 2 years ago

Clojure codebases may be easier or more difficult to maintain depending on factors such as team experience, project complexity, and code quality. The ease of tracking down bugs varies across programming languages and is influenced by development practices and tooling. Clojure codebases are not more difficult to maintain than any other PLs.

- Clojure has strong type inference, catching many errors at compile-time.

- The REPL provides immediate feedback and testing capabilities.

- Clojure's immutability and functional paradigms reduce bug-prone code.

- Tools like core.spec offer runtime type checking and data validation.

- IDEs like Cursive provide advanced static analysis and refactoring support.

- Clojure's simplicity and consistency make bugs easier to spot and fix.

- You also completely ignoring Clojure's rich ecosystem of testing frameworks and tools.

erichocean• 2 years ago

I find it extremely hard to read.

I avoided Clojure for nearly 15 years because I thought so too.

Turned out I spoke English and couldn't read Russian. But that didn't mean Russian was unreadable—I just didn't know how. It had nothing to do with whether or not it was "readable" or not, it was easy to read (and understand) once I learned how.

After about two weeks, I found reading Clojure to be just as easy as any other code. I did that at 46, so I don't think age is a major barrier. (I've written read and written code my entire life.)

I'm now writing Clojure code every day and am much happier as a developer. (That's why I made the effort initially, and it definitely paid off.)

One thing that really helped was asking ChatGPT or Claude to explain a piece of Clojure code to me, when I had questions. Especially early on, that was invaluable.

Also, learning structured code editing made a big difference—I consider it to be essential. It was extremely frustrating until I spent an afternoon doing that.

Clojure code is "read" differently than, say, Python or JavaScript or C and that's reflected in how you navigate and edit the code.

YMMV

grugagag• 2 years ago

Can you expand on structured code editing?

radix73• 2 years ago

I've tried to learn Clojure a few times and just bounced right off every time. I found it impossible to read and frustrating and tedious to write. Everyone else who tries it seems to fall in love, but I really don't get it.

tincholio• 2 years ago

It does take some patience, but once it clicks, it's just awesome.

iLemming7• 2 years ago

I found it impossible to read and frustrating and tedious to write.

Perhaps you've done it wrong? To read any Lisp code one needs a REPL. And you don't typically type directly in it, you connect to it and eval things from source files. Once you get connected to a REPL, you can eval any expression and sub-expression, and with practice, you'd learn to grok the code without a REPL.

And for writing Lisp, you only need structural editing support in your editor. Once you find basic commands - moving structures around is far more enjoyable process than writing things in an unstructured language.

I am far more productive using Clojure instead of Java and Clojurescript instead of Javascript, Fennel instead of Lua, etc. - it's easier to read, easier to modify, easier to maintain. But, yeah, it does require some practice, just like any other skill.

michaelsbradley• 2 years ago

Cljfx is also worth a look!

https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx

Dansvidania2• 2 years ago

Does anyone close to the project know when/if it will no longer be in "No docs, and everything changes every day" release status?

tonsky6• 2 years ago

We have workshop planned for the middle of September, after that, I hope things will start to stabilize a bit. I already started documenting some stuff in examples app, sort of self-documenting integration tests. Will have normal docs too, of course

https://s.tonsky.me/share/Screenshot%202024-08-27%20at%2017....

rlkf• 2 years ago

I found this dimension of the analysis:

People prefer native apps to web apps
Java has “UI curse”: Looked bad

to be at odds with this aspect of the design:

No goal to look native
Leverage Skia

socksy• 2 years ago

"People prefer native apps to web apps" is talking about literally using an app on your desktop, in the dock, with keyboard shortcuts, rather than having a website in your browser. This is sort of shown by the amount of Electron apps people use — you could use slack, spotify, or vscode in the browser, but most people prefer to use the app.

"Java has UI curse" is referring to how when Java tries to imitate native UI (note the difference to "native app", which is in contrast to a web app), it fails and hits the uncanny valley. No-one likes it.

Given that, it's not a contradiction to have a native app, that does not try to use the native GUI toolkit of the host platform, using Skia directly to draw UI elements.

wry_discontent• 2 years ago

I used a few electron apps in a browser because the Linux experience wasn't working well for me, and it was a dramatically better experience.

truculent• 2 years ago

I suppose it’s just to clarify that those choices are deliberate, with the trade-offs in mind.

The README also suggests that the reason why people prefer native apps isn’t just the UI’s aesthetics, but:

Normal shortcuts, icon, its own window, file system access, notifications, OS integrations

dzonga• 2 years ago

where did the myth that people prefer apps that look native to the platform come from?

There are two types of apps: 1. the ones that professionals use and 2. the ones that consumers use.

for 1. they don't care if it looks native, as long as it works and is performant e.g. DAWs, Video Editing tools, Trading, etc.

2. likewise I don't think it matters that much.

my guess is the myth came from OS makers.

layer84• 2 years ago

Native look&feel makes for a consistent UX across apps. Users learn one set of conventions and UI controls that uniformly applies to all applications. In addition, all applications benefit from enhancements made to the native UI toolkit and integration with the OS (input methods, file dialogs, keyboard navigation, automations, …).

Moreover, web UIs tend to be less sophisticated and less power user friendly, due to HTML/CSS and browser API limitations. This unfortunately often carries over even to non-browser-based applications that however use a web-like UI.

regularfry• 2 years ago

There's a slightly deeper part to this which is that if I see a native UI toolkit in use, I can be at least relatively confident that the accessibility affordances I expect to be there haven't been half-arsed in some custom widget set implementation. That's part of the "one set of conventions" expectation you mention, but it's an important one. There's a lot of embedded knowledge in native widgets.

novagameco2• 2 years ago

I don't personally believe it's ever been true that users want the same UI styling across apps. When given the option to customize the colors or layout of an app, users will do that. People want their applications to follow common UI patterns, but applications should have some kind of personality to them, otherwise they just look like Microsoft or Apple products

arzig• 2 years ago

An anecdote:

I don’t care if things look native, however I am actively repulsed by modern web design trends.

sussmannbaka• 2 years ago

It comes from macOS users, really. On windows nothing looks native because nobody can make sense of what native looks like in current-year. On Linux, lol. Lmao. On macOS? Your app better is native because it will stick out like a sore thumb if it isn’t and I won’t use it.

troupo2• 2 years ago

When apps have native look and feel, they have consistent behaviour, affordances and accessibility:

- buttons are labeled and placed correctly, and respond to expected input (including secondary focus and secondary action on MacOS, for example)

- dropdowns/selects behave correctly, and respond to expected input (for example, you can type to select in MacOS dropdowns).

- windows have OS-defined areas for drag/resize, for titles, for toolbars etc. They also appear correctly in the OS's window management tools (app switchers etc.)

- text inputs use the OS-default shortcuts and have access to OS-provided tools (e.g. spell checker)

- controls and windows respond correctly to keyboard and mouse. E.g. for a while Apple's own Catalyst apps didn't have the standard Cmd+Q to close the app. Many custom modals do not dismiss the modal on Escape

- context menus are standard in the places where you expect standard context menus. Well, app menus, too.

And the list just goes on and on.

tonsky6• 2 years ago

All good points, all true. But what’s also true is that current trend is to come up with arbitrary-looking controls even on apps made by Apple themselves. Nobody knows what native is supposed to look like. I’m not saying it’s good, it’s just what is happening.

layer84• 2 years ago

The readme says it is aiming for a “web look”, with no intention to make it look — and, presumably, behave — native. As a user, that’s not what I expect and hope for from a desktop application.

user432678• 2 years ago

Following the author for some time and his main point is that “electron” won already, even despite the fact that the author himself doesn’t like it. And he’s not wrong. Majority of desktop users probably don’t care already if it’s native look or not (don’t cite me on that). The goal of the project to provide a way creating quite performant desktop apps with a DX of Clojure. And it’s a nice goal.

pelagicAustral• 2 years ago

I can relate (I think). I mean, I don't care what the general look of the app is, even if gimmicky of what native desktop looks, as long as the design, general aesthetic, and cohesion are kept well defined, structured and organized. I do not like Electron, I hate to have "little chromes" just so I can do X and Y. I crave true native apps, even if they still look kind of web'ish.

miroljub3• 2 years ago

There's no native app, even on desktops. There are a bazillion of different UI frameworks with different look & feel on Windows alone, even within Microsoft products. On Linux or macOS, the situation is no better.

Native is what doesn't run in an emulator, in this case everything non-Electron fits the definition.

rafaelmn2• 2 years ago

At this point it feels like this argument is dead an buried. So many non-native apps on every platform, most platforms even have multiple official GUI toolkits/widget styles so even first party apps are inconsistent.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

The most consistently-looking desktop I have runs under Linux. With a few settings and a right theme, all GTK2, GTK3, Qt, and Java apps look and feel pretty much the same, in a pleasant way.

MacOS is a close second, with a few native apps that can't decide exactly what a checkbox or a button should look like.

And Win10 on my wife's machine is a salad, reminding me of Linux desktop experience from 1998.

giancarlostoro2• 2 years ago

Isn't this the case with a lot of desktop GUIs that are cross platform?

layer84• 2 years ago

Cross-platform desktop UI toolkits generally try to replicate a native look&feel as much as possible.

diggan4• 2 years ago

Professional software (think Clip Studio Art, 3DS Max, Autodesk Fusion and alike) are almost exclusively disconnected from "native" looks, behavior and theming, which is perfectly fine, better than having a different experience depending on your OS.

I feel like it's mostly consumers who ask for native look, and particular users on macOS, as almost all other professional-oriented software doesn't offer that. But yet it comes up for every GUI toolkit that lands on the HN frontpage.

hombre_fatal• 2 years ago

I doubt most consumers ask for a native look. It's more like an HN meme.

I don't even think native macOS UI is so great cross-plat programs should target it. It's full of its own weird conventions like a "New item" button being a tiny "+" at the bottom of the left sidebar, the last place I always look.

Safari is an example of UX that has stuck to hard macOS conventions and was always worse off for it. Not until recently did it begin relenting, and now it's bearable to use as a daily driver. Xcode is another classic example of hostile native macOS UX conventions. Finder.app is another.

I'd rather software ask "what's the UX that makes the most sense?" rather than "how can I make my UI look native?" On HN people seem to think by solving the latter, you solve the former. But that isn't the case.

greener_grass• 2 years ago

For Linux users it's a non-native look-and-feel or no app at all.

tonsky6• 2 years ago

It’s a tradeoff. You either make your app native but only for one platform, or you make it look “universal” and run on all three.

layer84• 2 years ago

That’s not accurate, there are cross-platform toolkits that achieve at least a close-to-native look&feel. This is very different from giving up on it entirely and going web-style UI.

BaculumMeumEst2• 2 years ago

If only Clojure wasn't tied to the fucking JVM

askonomm• 2 years ago

Doesn't have to be: see https://jank-lang.org/, https://babashka.org/

Dansvidania2• 2 years ago

may I ask what this sentiment comes from?

I sincerely want to know what I am missing, because the fact that Clojure is hosted on the JVM (mainly) seems like a plus to me.

I don't much like the build tools in the jvm environment such as maven or gradle, and the error messages could be better for sure. Is there more ugliness that I should look into?

BaculumMeumEst2• 2 years ago

What you said, plus applications use a ton of RAM and are a pain in the ass to distribute.

iLemming7• 2 years ago

Well, first of all, JVM, even though it still gets a lot of bad rap (mainly due to Java) turns out to be really nice piece of tech, especially if the aim is to scale CPU-intensive tasks.

Besides - Clojure is not JVM-only, Clojure is a hosted language, it can work a top of different platforms: JS engine - Clojurescript; Flutter - ClojureDart; Native Code scripting - Babashka; NodeJS - nbb; .Net - Clojure CLR; Fennel even though technically is not a Clojure, is a lovely little language very similar to it and it works on Lua. There's also jank-lang, currently in development that works on top of LLVM. There are a bunch of other Clojure dialects - for Rust, Go, Python, Erlang, etc.

dig1• 2 years ago

Clojure and Flatlaf [1] tick all the boxes for me. If I want declarative-ish UI, I can always throw in Seesaw [2]. Everything else I find cumbersome, pulls tons of unnecessary dependencies and (usually) ends up abandoned in a year or two. With Swing, I know it is well-documented and will work for the next 30 years. But YMMV and I'm hoping that HumbleUI could be an exception.

[1] https://www.formdev.com/flatlaf/

[2] https://github.com/clj-commons/seesaw

swarthy_avenger• 2 years ago

FlatLaf is incredible and breathes new life into the Swing UI framework.

iamcalledrob• 2 years ago

Having worked with Swing recently, I worry that it will not work well on the near-distant future, because it feels frozen in time at about 2005.

There are a lot of assumptions baked in that aren't holding up today.

For example, high density and multi monitor aren't well supported. There's a bunch of stuff hard-coded in the JDK that no longer makes sense and you have to hack around.

vips7L2• 2 years ago

I haven't worked with FX or Swing lately but I could have sworn they delivered hidpi support. Maybe in this JEP? https://openjdk.org/jeps/263

lemming• 2 years ago

I recommend using the JetBrains JRE, they have fixed lots of these sorts of issues, as well as greatly improved hot class reloading for development.

cess113• 2 years ago

What does it bring that https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx does not?

Clojure Desktop UI Framework

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