ClojureScript vs Tcl
When comparing ClojureScript vs Tcl, the Slant community recommends Tcl for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Tcl is ranked 31st while ClojureScript is ranked 41st. The most important reason people chose Tcl is:
Unlike *sh Tcl has a rich standard library.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Live interactive programming with figwheel
Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time.
Pro Simple syntax
Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead.
Pro Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries
Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries.
Pro Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations
Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece).
Pro Share application logic between browser and Clojure server
Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server.
Pro Can be used with React out of the box
Pro Excellent build tools
Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment.
Pro Excellent tools for web development
ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process.
Pro The Spec core library
From the creator of Clojure:
Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure.
Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation.
Pro Standard library
Unlike *sh Tcl has a rich standard library.
Pro Sane quoting rules
Unlike in sh you don't need to quote your variable substitutions ('"$1"').
Expanding of arguments occurs mostly explicit and if yet expected in-place (e. g. using eval
or subst
) it follows strict and well clear rules.
So exec test $argv
would execute test with single argument.
And appending {*} before $argv
would execute test with all arguments (list expansion).
Pro Cross-platform
With a little care you can have the same script work on Linux, *BSD, OS X and Windows.
Pro Widely available
You can expect a reasonably recent version of Tcl to either installed or available in the repositories of any popular open source *nix.
Pro Everything is a string
Tcl can operate at the same level of abstraction as the POSIX shell, which makes it easier to manipulate the output of other programs.
Pro Tk and Expect
Pro Standalone packages
Tcl enables easy deployment through self-contained binaries known as starpacks.
Pro Rich scripting capabilities on a single line
Want to run something 5 times? Here you go: set i 0; time { puts done-[incr i] } 5
If you need real conditional cycle? Not a problem: for {set ready 0; set i 1} {$i <= 100 && !$ready} {incr i} { if {[exec do-some-thing] eq "ready" } {set ready 1} }
Want to measure performance of something or repeat it max 300 times and not longer than 1 seconds? Very simple: timerate { after 20 } 1000 300
How about notifying yourself when some http-server is back online? Sure thing: while {[catch { close [socket localhost 80] }]} { after 1000 }; puts "\7\7\7ONLINE!"
And you can do it also fully asynchronously using events etc.
Cons
Con Tooling is horrible
I've never seen worse tooling before. Writing tests and getting test coverage reports is near impossible. Tooling is brittle and clunky. Feels prehistoric.
Con Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp
Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language.