rn-rf-shadow VS rich4clojure

I'm using rn-rf-shadow as base for my React Native app in clojure.

A cool example: https://youtu.be/3HxVMGaiZbc?t=1783

But better to just block 5 mins in your calendar and try it: https://github.com/PEZ/rn-rf-shadow

Don't play with this if you like hot-reload or hot-refresh features in react or jrebel or whatever. You will forever see these other approaches as lame in comparison... speaking from someone who was previously very happily ignorant, living my best life on the JRebel side of the fence.

rn-rf-shadow (A cljsrn template for getting started creating web, iOS and Android apps)

The old 4Clojure site is not available any longer. I can (in a highly biased way) recommend using Rich4CLojure in the comfort of your favorite editor.

I've been messing with Clojure/ClojureScript for a few years having previously had zero Lisp experience. Overall, I think Clojure does a good job of being both practical and lispy. It's a language that is for building real things.

I've been focusing on ClojureScript (https://clojurescript.org/) as you get the benefit of interoperating with the Javascript ecosystem. The fact that there's a strong community around both Javascript hosted and Java hosted gives a wealth of library options.

Overall, the tooling has been getting a lot closer to the sort of experience that contemporary developers expect. The Calva plugins integration with Visual Studio (https://calva.io/) makes it easy to get started - you can even run it online with gitpod (https://github.com/PEZ/rich4clojure).

That just leaves learning the language - the slight changes in syntax (brackets for different data types) definitely help early on, and for the most part Clojure discourages people going down the path of macros which means reading other peoples code is reasonably accessible. The main struggle is that it's a language used by a lot of advanced or full-time developers, so documentation is pretty dense and it can take a real commitment to understand the detail.

It may not be 'correct' enough if you're coming from other Lisps, but coming the other way from C/Python etc I've found it an accessible and practical option.

Rich 4Clojure (editor/IDE based 4Clojure with a zero-install option)

(And arlier this week I did an adaption of Rich 4Clojure, adding a zero-install option there as well.)

A cheap (in terms of effort and impact on your computer) way to see how you like Calva is to try the Gitpod option of Rich 4Clojure: https://github.com/PEZ/rich4clojure