what was the reason for the re-write?

any pro's/conns?

I’d be interested in knowing that too. I guess the team wasn’t really too excited about the prospect of using Clojure…?

We had decided to introduce browser testing (eg with Playwright or Etaoin) for our team. The team has little to no Clojure experience (except from me and one other developer). Other “nearby” teams have a lot of Javascript knowledge, so Javascript is familiar. --- We wanted to use the browser testing first for monitoring. We had experienced that parts of the system failed without anyone noticing, and we believed we could catch those errors with browser tests. I did a first “spike” to learn Playwright myself. I started with Clojure, since I know Clojure and the REPL is awesome for exploration. After a while I felt like I knew what Playwright was about. Then I wanted to see how the same code looked in Javascript, since I knew there was always a chance the team would not be comfortable maintaining Clojure. We have a technology radar, and Clojure is on “try”. We observed: 1. Interacting with a running web browser through a REPL is amazing 2. Translating the Playwright Java API docs required some mental juggling — and the only person kind of comfortable writing java interop in Clojure was me 3. The Playwright API is object oriented, and I found myself missing data oriented APIs. There is a pure clojure webdriver implementation (https://github.com/clj-commons/etaoin), and I’d probably try that next time. 4. Writing Playwright tests using the Node/typescript API was a really smooth experience. It’s well documented, and there’s a “test recorder” that works smoothly. We are also experimenting with using Clojure for another problem, where Clojure is more suited. I prefer to keep new technologies we as a team are trying out to a limited place, so that the code can be deleted if we decide to back out of the experiment. So I was happy to continue with the Javascript/Typescript Playwright code, and leave the Clojure code.

In short, context is relevant, and we want to write code that we are comfortable maintaining.

yup, that makes sense. Still, so many devs seem stuck in that JS/TS mindset these days (or Python, in my own domain) and I can’t help but feel a bit sad at the homogenisation of software developer jobs. I guess it’s always been like this, though,

Yeah — I’ve faced the “what I know represents all there is” attitude a lot, and it just makes me mad.

I feel like we should encourage new developers to learn more than one language. One reason is not to get stuck in that mindset. Another is to build confidence and courage. Show them that they can learn new languages, that it’s not impossible.

I have cursory experience with Playwright and Etaoin and while Etaoin is nice from a sexp juggling perspective, there's stuff built up around js Playwright that you don't get for free with Etaoin, like the recorder you mention, and other niceties. Apart from the immediate language difference (syntax and such) in a decision making scenario like yours, there's also the language community, and the tools and knowledge that come with it, to consider. It sucks in a way, because it reinforces the homogenisation loop.

> It sucks in a way, because it reinforces the homogenisation loop. “Reinforces the homogenisation loop” in the sense that Clojurians keep on using Clojure tools, and Javascript-folks keep using Javascript things?

In the sense that more people are drawn to the popular solution, and that is both more workforce and incentive for that workforce to create tools for the popular solution, leading to even more draw towards the popular solution which now has more fancy tools, and so on and so forth

It was a sort of reckoning we should have built everything using it, we hadn't and now we're doomed

Sounds like we should repent

I woke up feeling very conflicted

Heck, I’m feeling conflicted now!

Did sleeping on it another night make it better or worse?

What is this thing you speak of? This "sleep"?

While I respect that certain beings don't need much sleep, I think there's value in keeping up the illusion for the sake of earthlings!