| > with not very nice tooling The tooling is the best. Figwheel is hot reload that never goes down, devcards is revolutionary, and a browser repl for live in editor evaluation... > significantly different from the existing javascript code base you already have It actually isn't. Clojurescript is basically javascript that's immutable first, has underscore in it's core library, and then a bunch of other awesome language constructs. The libraries use the same patterns, re-frame is a nicer, more succinct abstraction over react-redux. > poor interop to the existing js ecosystem The interop might be the best out there. Seriously you can write javascript in clojurescript. you can straight up import es6 jsx javascript into your clojurescript code. (thanks Google Closure) > For javascript, that crowd of alternatives is so much larger I mean, what are the options? Clojurescript's benefits are so much more than the language. The real pluses for clojurescript are the Google Closure compiler, hot reload, browser repl, devcards, front end libraries. The language is the cherry on top. There are no alternatives that have a comparable platform not completely alien to JS developers. |
But I do like Clojurescript. However, it needs to wean itself away from the all the Java tooling and not require a JDK. We need a lein/figwheel written in node CLJS. An extension that supports REPL like Lumo and step through debugging within visual studio code. A good Clojurescript book. A good React-based UI component library written in CLJS.