Biff.core: system composition for Clojure web apps

Posted by jacobobryant 10 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by lukaszkorecki 5 hours ago

Maybe I'm grumpy and old or something, but I wish there was only one Component library for Clojure, out of all the things this should have been the one everyone settled on.

Comment by jacobobryant 5 hours ago

If everyone wants to move to biff.core that's fine with me!

Comment by embedding-shape 49 minutes ago

Said every author of a component library :) Maybe the plurality of choice is good.

Comment by jacobobryant 13 minutes ago

hehe yes. There are plenty of other languages with dominant frameworks etc; I like being in a community of experimenters.

Comment by holistio 10 hours ago

Recently my impression has been that whatever the agentic tools are best at is also what's best for solo projects or proof of concepts.

I used to love writing custom CSS, but Claude is just so much better at Tailwind that I ended up switching, even though I still kind of loathe the class soup.

Is AI any good at Clojure?

Comment by iLemming 8 hours ago

> Is AI any good at Clojure?

It's okay when you use it just like any other PL, which is roughly the Unix/pipe model - batch-style. Agent spawns process -> reads stdout/stderr -> spawns next process. State lives in-between the calls and in files. Each tool invocation is stateless.

Things get far more interesting when you give an LLM a true Lisp REPL. LLM stops guessing and starts empirically analyzing current state of things and produces working solution faster, costing far less tokens. And you get to watch it solve things interactively, e.g. I often let AI poke through our UI (via Playwright-driven Clojurescript REPL), while monitoring situation in k8s - through nrepl port, connected to Clojure REPL.

Comment by jwr 9 hours ago

AI is very good at Clojure. In fact, from what I can see, I get a much better experience on a large Clojure+ClojureScript code base than many other people. Surprisingly so. I'm still not sure why, is it higher token density of the language? My experience? Large, well-written and well-maintained code base to lean on as context? In any case, the experience so far has been excellent.

Comment by Capricorn2481 59 minutes ago

I have been trying to explain to people that LLMs are worse in languages like Rust. You have a better test harness with the type system, but the syntax is so much more complicated. Handling all of those special cases, where a misplaced asterisk can mean accessing a completely different data structure, is exactly what LLMs are bad at. Because it is just trying to write something plausible.

Clojure meanwhile is very terse without being unreadable. It really does read like a series of data transformations.

Comment by mechanicum 9 hours ago

Last year, I thought it was awful. Even Opus would reliably unbalance parentheses on practically every edit and then enter a doom spiral of making things worse as it tried to figure out the right place to put a `)`.

Recently, I’ve been quite impressed, at least with Claude. At some point they figured out the parens issue, and the code is largely solid and idiomatic. I’ve mostly used it with Polylith apps, so the context for any given change is naturally well-defined. Usual issues with failing to reuse existing functions or make sound decisions about architecture, but no more so than I’ve seen with TypeScript or Rust.

I think there are a few points in its favour: it’s a very concise language, the documentation is terse but precise and comprehensive, and while there’s obviously nowhere near as much Clojure out there as there is JavaScript or Python, there is a lot. As the Clojure demographic skews toward experienced, senior programmers, I’d guess the quality of that corpus is probably well above average.

Java stack trace errors might even be an advantage now.

Comment by kayo_20211030 8 hours ago

Yes. Generally, it's quite good. It does have a blind spot with parens, but good old Claude Opus then cranks up a python script (yes!) to sort it all out. I wouldn't leave any of the models out on their own - you'll still have to clean up some obviously crazy stuff, but it's pretty clear what needs to done. In conclusion, Claude and ChatGPT are quite decent at Clojure. Oh, I do like Biff.

Comment by y1n0 8 hours ago

I would guess the parens will be problematic because of tokenization. something like `)))` is a single token and so is ')])'. I think having strings like that as single tokens probably makes the link between open and closing parens harder to associate. Probably could be papered over with harness help.

Comment by arikrahman 7 hours ago

It's the language best positioned for AI with world class nREPL.

Comment by devin 7 hours ago

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I almost never run into paren-matching issues. Hooked to a working REPL, Clojure isn't merely "good", I'd say it is dominant compared to a lot of other langs.

Comment by oDot 10 hours ago

This is a bit of an "XY Problem" question.

I have migrated all my code to Gleam, FE and BE, Bun, browser, and BEAM.

Claude knows much less about Gleam than it does about Javascript or React. However the constraints of Gleam and its Elm inspired framework Lustre are so strong, Claude gives me much better results.

The only difference is I need to adjust my initial guidance.

Comment by elxr 8 hours ago

Any favorite gleam projects to learn from?

I've always admired the direction gleam was heading in, and the community is awesome. But with gradual typing now in elixir, I'm weighing whether or not gleam offers anything special enough to get me spending time there instead of just using elixir.

Comment by bananadonkey 3 hours ago

I am currently working through https://lukwol.github.io/gleam-guide/ and it's fun so far as a ReasonML/Elm/elixir enjoyer

Comment by escherize 6 hours ago

I wrote a book about setting up a small gleam project, covers organization of the project in general. A draft is live at https://escherize.com/gleam-katas

Comment by elxr 5 hours ago

Beautiful. Will definitely work through this.

Comment by packetlost 8 hours ago

Lustre is great

Comment by bbkane 9 hours ago

How are you liking Gleam and Lustre? What went particularly well or badly?

Comment by jacobobryant 10 hours ago

AI has been working out well for me writing Clojure, both in personal projects and at work. Documentation, not so much... I write all that by hand.

For Biff I've been using AI to generate a rough draft of all the code and then I take a manual pass over things before releasing. Seems to be a good middle ground.

Comment by holistio 3 hours ago

If anyone can enlighten me as to why my above comment is getting downvoted: please do.

My impression is that I voiced a valid concern. I suspected handling parentheses is problematic.

Comment by michaelmrose 8 hours ago

It is but it remains shockingly bad at closing sufficiently deeply nested parens at least as far as chatGPT

Comment by iLemming 8 hours ago

I bet you're just treating it like any other (non-homoiconic) language. An agent that edits files and re-runs `clj` is doing something fundamentally different from what a Clojure developer typically does. When you give the agent a REPL - things get far more interesting.