TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

re-frame: A software FPGA

Ever since ClojureScript was announced I've been keeping tabs on it here and there to see what sorts of interesting frameworks people come up with. I'm pretty picky when it comes to UI development (not because I'm particularly good at it, just because I'm picky in general) and something needs to do quite a bit to convince me it's worth using over plain HTML+CSS+JavaScript. (Not a fan of Backbone, but I did like Angular.)

Anyway, re-frame has been on my radar for a while as "the pinnacle alternative to Om". Om is really neat, but I've never tried it enough to feel like I wanted to try more of it. I've known about reagent for a while (that re-frame is built on) and instantly loved its usage of Hiccup to specify markup. Hiccup is so straightforward and simple I still haven't fully read its spec, though I should do so because it's kind of disturbing to me that if I have a "component" (function) that returns something like [:h1 fn-arg] then I can insert that as a child element to something else either with [my-fn fn-arg] or (my-fn fn-arg)...

Anyway again, last weekend I finally sat down and read all the through re-frame's manifesto in its README. And afterwards I thought: wow, this reminds me a lot of FPGA programming. I decided to 'redo' an FPGA assignment I had in college, using re-frame. This evening I cleaned up what I made and wrote this up.

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