IMO, the ClojureScript SPA ecosystem is a stronger competitor in its domain than Clojure on the backend.
Re-frame in particular is a gem. It's as though someone tried the React/Redux stack, thought long and hard about actions and selectors, and realized that with one or two more pieces, everything falls into a beautiful, purely functional harmony.
Clojure on the backend is awesome because you can use mature, stable, pure Clojure libraries for almost everything and it works together beautifully.
ClojureScript on the other hand suffers from constantly having to interop with JS libs and tools, or trying to wrap them, with many wrappers being outdated or having a bus factor of 1.
I feel like the advantages of CLJS have eroded over the past few years:
- TypeScript has fully taken over, generalizing the advantages of static typing
- JS libraries have adopted functional patterns, narrowing the comparative advantage of CLJS
Re-frame in particular is a gem. It's as though someone tried the React/Redux stack, thought long and hard about actions and selectors, and realized that with one or two more pieces, everything falls into a beautiful, purely functional harmony.