[tekacs]

> All those anonymous function wraps add clutter, and that clutter accumulates.

Another great example of this is feature flags -- adding/removing an entire chunk of code in most languages tends to be limited to (for example) the inside of a function.

    (when-feature :something
      (def some-constant ...)
      
      (defn some-function [...]))

... is not possible in most languages, where you end up intermingling conditionals into the body of definitions and functions all over the place, creating dead code and issues besides.

> JavaScript users are stuck with JSX, which is less concise, and in my opinion far less good.

And a key aspect to it as well is that JSX is a fully-custom extension, not something that can be implemented in JS as a library -- whereas Hiccup is 'just another library' allowing for fast iteration and experimentation by the community.

[kayodelycaon]

If the code in the parens that does what I think it does, Ruby has the same capability. Ruby allows you to redefine and even undefine... just about everything. Case in point: `binding.local_variable_set`. https://www.rubydoc.info/stdlib/core/Binding I think the only thing you can't do is undefine a local variable.

I've used environmental variables to determine which modules extend a class. This allowed me to test the same code against two different apis while we were migrating vendors. While this is done at "compile time", it could have easily been done during run time.

One nightmare of a system I worked on had the initializer of a class conditionally load modules to completely redefine the class. I called it reverse inheritance because it did the same thing as inheritance, without any of the readability or simplicity. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing. XD

But I think Ruby is the exception that proves the rule. It allows absolutely crazy things and probably deserves the label of being a weird language. It's just wrapped in the trappings of a non-weird language.