The Next Five Years of ClojureScript

I delivered a talk at the well attended ClojuTRE conference in Tampere, Finland this past September titled "The Next Five Years of ClojureScript". The ClojureScript community is growing at a healthy clip and many recent adopters are unaware that the ClojureScript development effort is so mature. I decided it was time to highlight how far the project has come and celebrate the incredible work of the community. While it's certainly true that Cognitect has and continues to lead core development, it's the community that has collectively delivered on the promise of the project by filling in so many important details. And of course, outside of core development there's been an unbelievable amount of broader open source activity to ensure ClojureScript is able to achieve the reach Rich Hickey talked about five years ago. Whether web browser, iOS, or Android - the ClojureScript community is bringing the simplicity of Clojure where we need it most.

The talk ends with some thoughts about ClojureScript looking ahead into the next five years. In many ways ClojureScript has and continues to be ahead of the JavaScript mainstream with respect to best practices. Concepts which are only starting to break into the mainstream such as immutability, single atom application state, and agile UI development via robust hot-code reloading are old news to ClojureScript users. And thanks to the under appreciated Google Closure compiler, ClojureScript offers features like dead code elimination and precise code splitting that popular JavaScript tooling is unlikely to achieve anytime in the near future.

Still despite some of these continuing issues, the JavaScript ecosystem offers many riches and looking at 2017 we'll be focusing on deeper integration with the various JavaScript module formats. As with Clojure and Java, a core ClojureScript value proposition is a simpler programming model that allows users to frictionlessly integrate those solutions from a vast ecosystem that precisely fits their needs.

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