kennytilton

I have written a couple of 80kloc Common Lisp apps. Not a problem. But we all are used to what we are used to, and anything different offends.

I definitely identify with addressed concerns over the hassles of my go-to debug approach, viz. print statements. I have a rather intense state engine that, when things go awry, can be brutal to debug with prints. But now I am doing ClojureDart, which I know is on the FS roadmap. The state engine is stable these days, but if it misfires before you get to CLJD, forgive me if I swipe your idea and roll my own ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of FlowStorm. Maybe a tenth.

FYI, they recently resumed activity on Hoplon. Good to see!

(a) Is six months a long time? (b) And then they delivered successfully. (c) Not seeing a problem.

I know, I have been beating on CLJD like I was its Daddy wrapping it in a reactive framework, despite their warning that there would be surprises. I had one problem that turned out to be a simple bug in CLJD.

I also follow their channel on the #clojurians Slack and see they are doing a profoundly deep job on the compiler. This means a robust product, not one that has developers forever looking over their shoulders at the language they are using.

Six months for that is nothing. Now send them eight dollars. jk. :)

"a full rewrite will be absolutely necessary"

cough Well, this article _is_ about a delightful Lispy alternative to Dart that compiles to Dart, yielding a superior language with Genuine Dart Inside(tm) and elegant support of Flutter.

Dart may end up living on inside ClojureDart, much like DOS living on deep inside Windows and PCs.

As a Dart/Flutter outsider myself, I am finding all this "Dart no, Flutter yes" traffic intriguing. I am also a lisper, so no need to sell me on the difficulties of Dart, even if it were the perfect static typed OO, but it sounds like we have a great UI stuck inside an unloved language.

Happy opportunity for ClojureDart!

btw, in case anyone is wondering, I am not a part of Team CLJD at all. My hack is my own separate effort.

I agree "UI = f(state)" rocks. That was the one thing React got right. But they never worked out state management, other than to kick off the Flux monstrosity that Redux ran with, and every other UI I can find.

As for what I call the "Lego model" of UI construction, while definitely off-putting, I think the "why" is prolly "simplicity thru decomposition". So we do a bit more typing but have a dead simple approach to building our UIs.

The nice thing about any Lisp with its macro capabilities is that we can wrap sth like Flutter to produce a library that remains Flutter, but hides the noise.

ClojureDart offers a so-called "widget" macro, and my Matrix library goes a different way, making every constructor such as "scaffold" into a friendlier macro.

It's my fault. And other active users. Tensegritics polled us on what we wanted first -- Tensegritics is neither Oracle nor Google -- and we all had a REPL in last place.

The one caveat I offered was "...but a REPL will be a selling point!" ROTFL

Seriously, when I want a REPL I hack the test code into "main" and comment out the UI launch. Then I edit and save and the output goes to my terminal nearby thanks to auto build/restart.

This reminds me so much of the ClojureScript "win". I love that JS is rounding into shape as a serious language, but the version turmoil! CLJS was "done" when it came out, so the CLJS developer is insulated from any churn.

I know little about Dart/Flutter history, but it sounds like ClojureDart might do a lot for Flutter development if only for CLJD's stability.

Wow! Coconut alone looks impressive.

Is there a state management solution in there? I looked at the Todo app and it looked like manual change propagation.