FAQ (for JavaScript developers)

Immutable data structures are like regular data structures, except that they cannot change. So what reason is there to prefer them, since they obviously have less capabilities?

Actually, you can change immutable data structures, it’s just that ‘change’ does not mean the same thing. In this case, changing means making a new data structure, that has some differences to the one you started with.

In JavaScript, you’re already doing this when working with strings, booleans, and numbers: incrementing a number is making a new number; appending to a string is making a new string.

So you should really not think of immutable data structures as constrained containers, but as composite values.

You should feel reassured by the fact that persistent data structures are hard to implement efficiently. There are some sophisticated algorithms doing the heavy lifting for you behind the scenes so you can have your cake and eat it too. This is similar to Garbage Collection: an algorithmic innovation which yields semantics that are less natural for computers and more natural for humans.

This is all nice, but how will programming with values make my life better?

The most immediately visible benefit is that you will never have to use brittle techniques like defensive copying, cloning, etc., because you'll never have to worry about some other part of your code mutating your data from under you.

Let's see a concrete example. Imagine you have a Person model in your web app, and a component that lets you edit and submit changes to the value of the Person's fields. When programming with values, it is trivial to achieve the following functionality:

start editing from the current version of your model at some point in time
when editing, have your modifications be only local to your editing component, without affecting the rest of your app
conversely, have your app see changes to your model from an external source (e.g updates pushed from your API), while your local editing process still deals with the version it had started with
support undos and redos while editing
when submitting your changes, optimistically change the value of your model in your web app so that your changes are immediately visible, and revert them if the server comes back to you with an error.

More deeply, there are strong reasons to believe that values are a much more natural fit than mutable data structures for making information systems. This is particularly true in network-intensive applications like web apps (values are what you get from / send over the wire; it's not like your AJAX call was going to give you a data structure that lets you mutate your database). There's a talk which makes an excellent case for values.

Finally, even without considering the benefits of value-based programming, you'll find that ClojureScript's collections are just very powerful and pleasant to use, thanks to a very complete standard library.

... but how do I change anything ?

Since data structures are immutable, and locals are not variable, how to I make a program that evolves over time ?

Fear not: you won't have to use monads. ClojureScript acknowledges the need for mutable state, and provides a reference type, the atom, to manage it. Here's an example:

JavaScript:

// declaring the state
var state = {
  count: 0
};

// ...

// updating the state :

state.count = state.count + 1;

ClojureScript:

;; declaring the state
(def state (atom {:count 0}))

;; ...

;; updating the state
(swap! state #(update % :count inc))

ClojureScript atoms are superior to JavaScript variables in the same way that JavaScript functions are superior to, say, Java methods: because they're first-class. They can be passed to functions, referenced by data structures, and abstractions can be built atop them. In addition, atoms can be observed.

You'll find that you use much fewer ClojureScript atoms than you did JavaScript variables. The combination of atoms and immutable data structures allows you to manage your state in a few key places, instead of having it strewn all over your programs.

What value do macros bring?

A lot of people define macros as an easy way to customize the first steps of compilation. This is the kind of definition you understand only once you’ve used macros, so let’s explain it differently.

A macro lets you specify some transformation of your code; using a macro called my-macro is like saying to ClojureScript: ‘when I write (my-macro <this nice-looking code>), I mean (<this more tedious code>)' . In the same way that functions factor out parts of the execution of your programs, macros factor out parts of the writing of your code.

As a consequence, when you have macros, you can always make your calling your code as comfortable as possible, because the syntax will never get in your way.

For example, the doto macro lets you write

(def my-date (doto (new Date)
               (.setDate 7) (.setMonth 7) (.setFullYear 1991)))

which is as if you had written:

(def my-date 
  (let [d (new Date)]
    (.setDate d 7)
    (.setMonth d 7)
    (.setFullYear d 1991)
    d))

which you would have (painfully) written in JavaScript:

var myDate = (function(){
  var d = new Date();
  d.setDate(7);
  d.setMonth(7);
  d.setFullYear(1991);
  return d;
}());

More profoundly, macros make it trivial to separate 2 important concerns: making well-structured programs, and making them practical from a syntactic viewpoint.

But macros are not merely a means of eliminating boilerplate. By letting you extend and manipulate the syntax of ClojureScript, they enable you to import new paradigms to your programs.

Macros in ClojureScript make it possible to add these “features” to ClojureScript *à la carte, as libraries *:

Golang-style CSPs and ‘go-routines’ for asynchrony
OCaml-style pattern matching
an optional static type checker

Let’s also note that macros have zero runtime overhead, since everything they do happens when generating JavaScript.

… but I heard macros are bad practice, yielding code that is hard to reason about. Why use a language that supports them?

Indeed, even in the ClojureScript community it is considered bad style to use a macro when you don’t have to. ClojureScript application developers very rarely write macros, because most of the time a function can also do the job, and is easier to reason about.

But from time to time, you need to make a conceptual leap that only macros can achieve, because the tedium in the syntax cannot be mitigated with functions, or because it requires code analysis.

Macros are like planes. You don’t want to take a plane everyday to go to work. But from time to time, planes allow you to reach another continent in a matter of hours, so we’re glad we have them.

I’ll never get used to the syntax!

Indeed, transitioning from JavaScript syntax to Clojure syntax is daunting:

JavaScript:

myFun(x, y, z);

ClojureScript:

(myFun x y z)

You need to move one parenthesis from one side of the operator to the other, and remove the commas and semicolons.

Clojure’s syntax (aka EDN - Extensible Data Notation) is what makes writing macros in Clojure practical.

It’s most likely unfamiliar to you, but it’s not unnatural. Once you get used to it, you’ll find it has more regularity and less clutter than JavaScript.

This is fun, let’s do this again for data structure literals:

JavaScript:

{a : “b”,
 c : [d, e]}

ClojureScript:

{:a “b"
 :c [d e]}

As you can see, the main difference is you get rid of commas and columns.

Interestingly, although it does not seem like much, this has big implications on one important part of web programming: HTML templating.

Clojure’s data notation is so conveniently lightweight that several Clojure libraries use them to embed HTML templating in the language:

[:div.text-right
  [span “Click here: "] 
  [:button {:class “btn" :on-click #(do something)} “Click me!"]]

Can I call JavaScript from ClojureScript?

ClojureScript has very good JavaScript interoperability. ClojureScript function are regular JavaScript functions. The language provides primitives to access native browser objects, access and set properties of objects, create and manipulate JavaScript objects and arrays, and call any JavaScript function or method.

You can also write functions in ClojureScript and call them from JavaScript.

Can I use existing JavaScript libraries from ClojureScript?

Yes, for example many ClojureScript developers use libraries like React or d3.

How does ClojureScript compare to the newer ECMAScript versions?

ES2015, ES7, etc. bring a lot of expressiveness to JavaScript (arrows, generators, destructuring, ...) while addressing several of its shortcomings and deficiencies (modules, block scope, ...). Does this not make languages like ClojureScript pointless?

Comparing programming languages by listing their features is a dangerous exercise, but let's do it anyway. Most of the syntax enhancements newer ECMAScript versions bring, Clojure provides. The following table lists recent ECMAScript features and their ClojureScript equivalent.

ECMAScript	ClojureScript
Arrows	Clojure function expressions are already quite concise, and expression-based (compare `(fn [x y] (+ x y))` to `function (x, y){return x + y;}`). In addition, there is an even more lightweight function syntax (`#(+ %1 %2)`).
Classes	ClojureScript is not class-based by design; use data types and protocols to get the good parts of Object-Orientation. See next section for more details.
Template Strings	ClojureScript strings are multi-line, and the absence of commas makes using the `str` function for concatenation very natural; you can also use C-style format from the Google Closure library.
Destructuring	Available, also supports nesting and function parameters.
Default and rest arguments	Fully supported
Let and const	these are the exact semantics of ClojureScript's `let`.
Iterators and For..Of	Seq abstraction, which is implemented by all default collections.
Generators	Lazy seqs
Sets and Maps	part of the standard library (as persistent data structures), allow for arbitrary keys.
Proxies	Not relevant
Symbols	By design, ClojureScript is against information hiding, so no private members. Keywords can be namespaced, reducing the potential for conflict in map keys. Protocols let you extend the behaviour of existing data types without new visible members.
Math + Number + String + Object APIs	Similar functionality in both the standard library and the Google Closure library.
Number literals	there are literals for any base, with special syntax for octal and hexadecimal (and of course decimal)
Promises	Available via libraries
Reflect API	Not relevant
Tail Calls	partially supported via the explicit `recur` construct.

Why are there no classes ?

In no small part, Clojure was born as an answer to the limitations of Object Orientation as embodied by class-based languages like Java and Ruby.

From Clojure's perspective, classes conflate data representation, program logic, code organisation, state management, and polymorphism; all these concerns are separately addressed in Clojure by data structures, functions, namespaces, managed references, and 'polymorphism à la carte' construct (protocols and multimethods).

But how will I reuse code if I don't have inheritance ?

Even in the object-oriented world, the experts will tell you to favor composition over inheritance to achieve code reuse. Because functions are so fine-grained, they're very easy to compose.

Data structures are also easier to reuse than classes, because they imply less specificity.

(Note that both of these benefits are not specific to Clojure; you may have already experienced them by using JavaScript in a functional, data-oriented way).

If you have a strong object-oriented background, it may take you some time to learn to live without classes. Don't worry. This learning curve goes downhill, and your efforts will be rewarded.

Ecosystem

What’s ClojureScript's equivalent of Underscore.js / Lodash ?

It’s ClojureScript itself! ClojureScript comes with an excellent collections library. All the collections functions you know and love are there (map, reduce, filter, remove, …), and they work on abstractions, which means they are not restricted to javascripts objects and array-likes.

What frameworks are there for ClojureScript ? (like AngularJs, Backbone, Ember etc.)

You won’t find an equivalent of AngularJs or Backbone in ClojureScript. This is actually a good sign. In great part, what motivated these client-side frameworks was JavaScript’s lack of modularity, primitives and a decent standard library.

ClojureScript as a platform addresses these issues, and relies on the Google Closure library to address browser inconsistencies. The other concerns of building applications (e.g templating, server communication, routing etc.) are addressed by composing together special-purpose libraries.

To get started on ClojureScript projects, the ClojureScript Wiki provides several projects templates, as well as a catalog of libraries.

Do people use ClojureScript in production?

Yes they do.

Is ClojureScript mature/stable?

ClojureScript, as a programming language, is very mature. Clojure was carefully designed for several years before being made available to the public in 2008. When ClojureScript came out in 2011, Clojure had been tested and proven for several years on the JVM. This, along with the combination of Clojure's emphasis on simplicity and the fact that macros eliminate many difficult language design decisions, has led Clojure as a language to reach stability in only a few years.

If the transformations JavaScript is going through are a problem to you (new language features, paradigm shifts in the community, convention changes in programming shops, and all the changes they cause in the tooling and libraries), ClojureScript may be a nice place for you.

Of course, the language is not everything, and the ClojureScript library ecosystem will go through important transformations in the coming years. But one should note that this is happening in the JavaScript ecosystem as well, as shown by the massive adoption of paradigm-shifting libraries like React and Falcor, and the changes undergoing application platforms and requirements.

React and Flux

Does ClojureScript play well with React/Flux ?

Yes, almost everyone in the ClojureScript community uses React because of the deep synergies it has with functional programming as embodied by ClojureScript. In fact, a lot of ClojureScript programmers think of ClojureScript as the best way to leverage React.

The rich collections library, advanced control flow operators (such as cond, case, when, let, if-let, pattern matching etc.), and the fact that everything is an expression enable you to write rendering functions in a very direct and declarative way (you won’t have to lay out a bunch of intermediary variables).

Flux is very straightforward to implement in ClojureScript, thanks to the combination of persistent data structures and managed references (atoms). This is part of the raison d'être of influential libraries like Om.

In many respects, ClojureScript is leading the way for the wider React/Flux community, as shown by the progressive adoption of immutable data structures, the ‘all state in one place’ principle, and other functional techniques.

Can I re-use React components in ClojureScript?

Yes! Besides the fact that you can just use React in ClojureScript, the most popular ClojureScript wrappers to React (Om, Reagent and Quiescent) all let you include React components without any effort.

Tools

Are there good editors for ClojureScript?

Definitely. A lot of people use Emacs with Clojure, there are also excellent plugins for IntelliJ, Vim, Eclipse and Sublime Text.

You’ll probably find that structural editing is more practical than what you’re used to, because it naturally lets you manipulate the building blocks of your code (i.e expressions, not lines or words).

Are there build tools for ClojureScript?

Yes. Most ClojureScript developers use Leiningen to manage ClojureScript projects, which takes care of dependencies loading, packaging, and has plugins for front-end development workflow (CSS pre-processing, assets minification, etc.). Another popular tool is Boot.

In particular, ClojureScript with Figwheel is arguably the state-of-the-art of interactive front-end development, thanks to live code reloading and the ClojureScript REPL.

I don’t feel very good about ClojureScript relying on Google Closure.

Google Closure offers compelling advantages for front-end JavaScript developers:

a very comprehensive, battle-tested library
very efficient minification
dead-code elimination, i.e code which is not used is removed. (This is what enables the library to be comprehensive: you don’t have worry about the extra bytes when adding functionality.)

The majority of JavaScript developers have rejected Google Closure because of a major drawback: for dead-code elimination to work, they had to follow strict discipline about the JavaScript they write (in particular, it ended up looking a lot like Java).

You don’t have this impediment when using Google Closure from ClojureScript, because the ClojureScript compiler emits JavaScript that is optimized for Closure out of the box. This means you can reap the benefits listed above without making any compromise on your language semantics.

Dead-code elimination is a great convenience for the application developer, but it has even deeper benefits for the development of the ecosystem. Library authors no longer have to make functionality-vs-weight tradeoffs because the users only get the bytes they use.

Platform

Can I run ClojureScript on the server-side, and share logic between server and client?

First, ClojureScript targets all major JavaScript engines. Therefore, you can run ClojureScript on NodeJS.

However, you won't find many examples of ClojureScript for writing NodeJS servers. For a variety of reasons, people tend to prefer the original JVM Clojure on the server (the library ecosystem is more mature, and it does not force you to write asynchronous code).

Since Clojure 1.7, it has become very easy to write Clojure code that targets both the Java and JavaScript runtimes.

However, when that approach fails (in the cases where you need to rely on JavaScript-specific functionality on both server and client), people tend to turn to Nashorn, the JavaScript runtime embedded in Java 8.

Which brings us to:

Can I make isomorphic applications with ClojureScript?

Various Proofs of concept have been published towards this goal, but currently there are no ready-made library solutions like Fluxible for this problem.

Does ClojureScript work in old browsers?

ClojureScript compiles to ES3-compliant code. It requires less discipline to write portable code in ClojureScript than in vanilla JS.

Practical use

What’s the debugging story like?

ClojureScript has excellent support for traditional JavaScript debugging techniques: you can set breakpoints in your source code, get ClojureScript stacktraces, etc. This is possible thanks to very well engineered source maps, which work even on production code with advanced minification.

In addition to this, REPL-driven development and hot-code reloading bring a whole new dimension to this, by enabling to test and modify stateful programs without erasing the conditions for a bug.

Icing on the cake: Macros help you here too. A typical JavaScript debugging technique is to insert console.log calls in the middle of your code, but this quickly gets tedious and intrusive.

For example, let’s assume you have this code, and suspect the myFun function is faulty:

var result = x + myFun(y);

What you would have to do is:

var z = myFun(y);
console.log(“myFun(y) : “, z);
var result = x + z;

In ClojureScript, you can define a spy macro that does the same thing in a very lightweight manner. So the equivalent ClojureScript code:

(let [result (+ x (myFun y))])

would become:

(let [result (+ x (spy (myFun y)))])

and you would see the same information in the console. Cool, huh?

ClojureScript looks nice in theory, but does it ‘just work’?

In many people’s opinion, more so than JavaScript :). The language semantics are less slippery, and the tooling is now mature enough to be used without worry.

Is ClojureScript slow?

Obviously, since ClojureScript is abstractions on top of JavaScript, it must be slower, especially because of persistent data structures.

Actually, the creators of ClojureScript had the pleasant surprise that JavaScript features is a very natural and direct foundation for ClojureScript's semantics (for instance, ClojureScript functions are regular JavaScript functions; ClojureScript protocols map to JavaScript prototypes in a very straightforward way). As a result, ClojureScript is quite fast.

ClojureScript's persistent data structures are obviously slower than JavaScript arrays and objects, but not as much as you'd think, because they were not implemented in a naive way (it's not cloning or copy-on-write). Here's a benchmark to give you an idea.

In addition, persistent data structures allow for global optimizations that are not possible with mutable data structures. In particular, ClojureScript has been known to significantly improve the performance of React apps by using persistent data structures for caching (http://swannodette.github.io/2013/12/17/the-future-of-javascript-mvcs/).

Learning ClojureScript

Is ClojureScript hard to learn?

This varies significantly depending on people’s programming experience and aptitudes.

If you’re a JavaScript developer, you’re in a good starting place to learn Clojure(Script) - more so than if you program in a classical language such as Ruby or Java - because JavaScript has already educated you to first-class functions, dynamic typing, conveying information with data structures (not classes), and organizing your code in namespaces (not class hierarchies).

Conceptually, you need to learn fewer things in ClojureScript that in JavaScript to get productive, because you don’t have to learn to avoid all the traps of JavaScript. The REPL and the fact that documentation is included in the language play a critical role in speeding up the learning process.

In all likelihood, the big challenge will not be to assimilate new concepts, but to forget old ones. As Yoda put it: ‘You must unlearn what you have learned [about imperative and object-oriented paradigms]’; this makes it harder for experienced programmers. Having said that, if you’ve been developing with JavaScript in a near-to-functional style (as advocated e.g by Douglas Crockford), this won’t really be a problem.

Is it only suitable for academics?

I heard functional programming is only accessible to people who have a Ph.D.

You don’t need to know Category Theory, Monads, etc. to use ClojureScript. For 99% of the work you’ll be doing, the programming concepts you’ll need are those you’re already using in JavaScript (dynamic typing, functions, data structures).

Community

Is there a community? How is it?

There is, and it’s growing fast. Actually, the community is often what people love most about Clojure. The Slack and various mailing lists are very active, and people are very responsive whenever you need help.

What characterizes the Clojure(Script) community is its combination of pragmatism, inventiveness, high quality standards, and wise leadership.

(Also, the people are very nice.)

Is the ClojureScript community pragmatic?

I’m wondering if the Clojure people are not just in love with some elegant ideas, without being lucid about their actual added value in the real world.

Most people in the Clojure community went through a sort of epiphany when exposed to the ideas of its creator (notably through some excellent talks like Simple Made Easy and The Value of Values), and felt greatly rewarded when adopting their incarnation in Clojure. As a consequence, we can sometimes be enthusiastic to the point we don’t seem very objective.

But you should know that practicality and pragmatism have always been core values of Clojure, which motivated fundamental decisions like targeting the popular platforms which are the JVM and JavaScript runtimes, as well as the design decisions of sacrificing some functional purity as compared to other languages. You can tell that the Clojure community has kept true to this spirit by all the efforts they have put in developing practical tools and extending Clojure’s reach to a broad spectrum of platforms.

Misc

This all seems too good to be true...

Clojure is based on the fundamental belief that aiming for simplicity can dramatically empower programmers. The counter-intuitive implication is that getting rid of sophisticated tools and techniques will actually make you more effective. You won’t believe it until you experience it.

I have another question!

You can suggest additional questions for this FAQ here.

In the meantime, don't hesitate to reach out to the community on StackOverflow or on the mailing list, people are very friendly!