git-of-theseus VS shadow-cljs

https://github.com/erikbern/git-of-theseus

A tangentially related tool you can use to look at a repo over time is Git of Theseus[1]. It shows things like "what percentage of the code in this repo survives 6 months.

[1]https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html

There're some more in the presentation article: https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html#:...

A kernel line has half-life 6.6 years.

Look at the codebase with Git of Theseus or Codescene

I guess one good example (that was mentioned just yesterday here on HN) would be Flask vs FastAPI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953470 - "There are no open issues or pull requests on Flask "

Quick count finds that FastAPI has 48422 lines of code, while Flask has 9995. Flask just achieved "Zero standing issues/PRs" while FastAPI has 1.1K open issues and ~500 open PRs.

Large surface area/API quickly leads to be overwhelmed when you're trying to maintain it. Adding new features/fixing existing ones becomes harder as well.

Best bet to make sure something is maintainable over time is to add as little as possible to it, and if you really have to, make sure you're also removing something at the same time.

Otherwise you need a massive team just to be able to "survive" and not making things rot.

There is this blogpost as well about the "half-life of code": https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html

Someone run that tool on the Clojure codebase as well, and it really shows how well the Clojure codebase has been written, as most code that was initially written is still there and does what it needs, without having to be rewritten.

Some parts of technical debt, you can find with https://github.com/erikbern/git-of-theseus or https://codescene.com/

* Single-Page App: shadow-cljs for the build concerns (https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs), Reagent with Re-frame for complex/large app (https://reagent-project.github.io and https://github.com/day8/re-frame). Even if we now prefer using HTMX (https://htmx.org) and server-side rendering (Hiccup way of manipulating HTML is just amazing, https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup).

Now, add shadow-cljs.

Work with latest shadow-cljs (& closure compiler) #890

You can already develop with ClojureScript on the back-end. A popular ClojureScript compiler, Shadow-CLJS (https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs) has a target for Node among many others.

Hi, I'm looking at Clojurescript again after not having paid attention to it after several years. Are you saying that shadow-cljs does something to deal with the, "I have no idea if this library I want to use works with the Google Closure compiler," problem? If so, what? I'd really like to know.

I don't know, the community in general tend to use macros that are well written. I keep seeing core.async being used (`go`) in Clojure projects, and also various macros for writing HTTP servers (compojure being a popular one which main code interface is a macro `defroutes`).

ClojureScript projects also routinely add support for making asynchronous code look synchronous (like `async/await` in vanilla JavaScript) via macros. shadow-cljs's `js-await` being one of the well-written ones: https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs/blob/49fb078b834e64f...

Usage:

    (defn my-async-fn [foo]

Unclear what "rendering a webpage" entails exactly.

If you want to do frontend development, you can give shadow-cljs a try, the quickstart is pretty quick: https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs#quick-start

If you want to just render server-side HTML, something like compojure (HTTP routing) and hiccup (Clojure data -> HTML) is pretty easy and quick to get started with (https://gist.github.com/zehnpaard/2071c3f55ed319aa8528d54d90...).

If you want to generate HTML files to serve with nginx/whatever, you can just use hiccup and `(spit)` the resulting HTML to files on disk.