@alandipert run into a snag with local storage atoms

getting an object like {0: "foo"} from a third party

throws an error because of the round trip through read-string

(cljs.reader/read-string (pr-str (js-obj 0 "a")))

errors out

you can't pr-str a js object

you need to do js->cljs before storing the value

kk 1 sec i'll try that 🙂

ah, i think i see what i was doing wrong @micha

originally i was doing what you're suggesting but also using keywordize-keys

it does not like 0 as a keyword

whoa really?

lol clojure syntax is so quirky

very unusual for a lisp

(cljs.reader/read-string (pr-str (js->clj (js-obj 0 "a"))))

all good

(cljs.reader/read-string (pr-str (clojure.walk/keywordize-keys (js->clj (js-obj 0 "a")))))

error

i've found that keywordizing keys of json is a bad idea

in general

well it's not json at that point

it's a cljs something

yeah but keywordize keys breaks round tripping

things like that

i made that mistake in the adzerk backend

and it is still causing problems

yeah i see that it would break a round trip back to json

but i was surprised to see ^^ break

we are dealing with an api, too

so like {"FooBar": 100} in json becomes {:foo-bar 100} or something

yeah

also if you have references in the json that refer to keys of other objects

those will be values

so they aren't keywordized

i'm like 5 or 6 levels deep in yak shaving right now

all because they changed from an array to an object between lib versions

do you have any experience with electron btw?

i'm thinking about trying to make my own browser with it

hah, only that i got one of my team at my last job to build some internal tools with it

so only vicariously 🙂

he said it wasn't too bad, was hooking up scala js to make a UI for a database encryption/decryption backend

so you can do "real" things with it for sure

yeah i just want a browser with no nonsense

just something that can load a webpage and that i can make my own UI for

i was really trying to get him to use hoplon with it at the time 😉

something like uzbl, which appears to be DOA

i feel like they'd be a good match

yeah especially for a desktop app

the ui for a desktop app is well suited to the -tpls i think

we were also considering hoplon + electron for an app to sit behind a touch screen for some IoT style devices

@micha what's wrong with chrome though? too much stuff going on?

yeah it's too complicated, and you need plugins to get a sane UI

and i don't trust plugins too much

also i don't use tabs or any of the ui stuff

like i don't use the "chrome" in the UI

ironic

and the way chrome works i can't make keyboard work very well

mmm, i'm a tab fiend

vimium is ok but has issues

could not imagine living without them

i use the tabbed layout in i3

the i3 window manager

and i have a plugin that forces new tabs to open in a new window

it's a rube goldberg machine at the moment kind of but it's pretty nice having the tabs be window manager tabs rather than some special in-browser tabs

because i can use the i3 keybindings to switch tabs

or i can move a tab to a different workspace, etc

using the normal i3 commands

one thing i would like to have is a vi-like modal interface

where it has normal mode and insert mode

normal mode would not send any keypresses to the webapp

so my vim keybindings for browser stuff doesn't interfere with the webapp keybindings if they have those

oh yeah, i see how that kind of standardises things

yeah i use the keyboard primarily, so keybindings are precious

have you seen uzbl?

it's a cool idea, but i think gtk3 screwed them over

i had a look when you mentioned it before 🙂

they're now sort of forked now, with old working code that is on gtk2 with an older version of webkit, and new not-working code that is on gtk3 with new webkit

and old webkit is just not usable in the modern age

but the idea of it is great

the browser itself doesn't do anything but render a webpage

if you click on a link it sends an event on a fifo

and you can have a script that tells it to load a new url

when you download something it sends an event on the fifo, and you can use wget or whatever to download it

if you want an ad blocker you just use a squid proxy

same with the browser cache

cache it in squid

so simple

mmm, but like you said, all the "rendering a page" stuff moves pretty fast

need to be able to keep up with it somehow

yeah that's why i was thinking electron maybe

but i'm not sure how minimal the browsing experience can be with it

i think they wrap chromium

maybe

which does way more stuff

well atom uses electron

the "browsing" is invisible unless you go looking for it

yeah the BrowserWindow class is the thing i'd want

oh, you're thinking if you go loading remote urls then bits of ui will start popping up?

also editing text areas in vim externally

not bits of ui i hope

i'd be surprised if that was the case

but like caches and cookies and keybindings

there are definitely keybindings

bummer

but i think you can do things with them

mask them

before chromium sees them

cmd + r definitely refreshed the browser when i was looking at what matt was doing with that database tool

but it doesn't "refresh" atom

but it does refresh slack

hopefully can mask those somehow

so there's some mechanism you can override there

hopefully it's not just the raw JS stuff

because keyboard shortcuts in JS can be a pita

yeah but only if you need to be able to run on different platforms with different keyboard layouts 🙂

i only need it to work for my machine

that's true

makes it a lot easier

it would be cool to have like macros too

well i mean, you could make it do whatever you want

i think postman is done in electron too

there are a few browser projects too

brave browser

that seems like something pretty close to what you're looking for

and like 5 others

but visual instead of the raw text

how do you mean?

maybe electron would be good to make a hoplon/ui ide too

oooh

haha yeah that would be fun

like a component maker

we were thinking that you could do osmething like this

like the actual deployed application would have some set of compiled components, defelems basically

the app talks to firebase when it loads to assemble the app from those components

the ui is designed in this ide and the assembly data stored in firebase

that would be completely separate from any backend you have

even if you use firebase as your backend

mmm i like that

the "business logic" part of the frontend would run in a web worker or something that is loaded separately

so the ui code is separate from your code that talks to the backend

you do want to make sure to support on/do as well as just defelem too

totally

you'd wire those up in the ide

to each other

like the webcomponents pattern kind of

i think it would be a challenge to get the right mix of being able to do everything and visual "magic"

the idea is to avoid visual magic

it's for business applications really

where you don't care about the latest artistic hotness

mmm, the "wiring up" though

you need a simple UI with really excellent workflows

javelin i thnk makes that very simple

it does

but it doesn't really have a "UI"

the UI is assembled by composing existing components

that is to say appendChild basically

then you can wire up cells to attributes

or events to cells

each component would declare its attributes

well yeah i know how to make a ui with javelin

i mean, a ui to show what's going where with javelin

and you'd have a component designer in the IDE

which has the visual representation of the compoenent plus a worksheet tab

like a spreadsheet

where you can wire up the attributes to cells

or events to cells

and you could make local cells for a given instance

i guess it is going to be tricky to show what goes where

yeah

but like a spreadsheet though, i think there are ways

i'm imagining something like what they do with audio/visual stuff

where you literally drag out inputs and outputs into each other

yeah i've seen some of those, but they get too complicated for anything nontrivial

like sticking leads into pedals 😛

like you open a little box and it's like a web of craziness

with like 100 things in there

oh, well, i supposed you can't force people to be organised

i don't think they let you factor thinsg into functions like you can with javelin

it's heavily OO

from what i've seen

that's how i manage complexity in javelin

if i have too many cells and it's hard to understand i will make a function that absorbs a bunch of formulas into one

and call that in the formula

that's not really restricted to javelin

yeah i don't think that the sound processing things have that though

so they need to express everything as individual little cells

well, classes

a guy i used to work with moved out of web and into more of this audio stuff, but i really can't remember the names of the programs now >.<

he said it wasn't really a big deal to switch between "wiring mode" and "editing the class" mode

i was watching a guy program one of those a while ago

it did not look ideal lol

he wasn't writing code though

he was like moving arrows around and stuff

yeah see that's the thing

if you can only do one or the other

it's going to be a painful process, not really using the tool properly

yeah that's why spreadsheets get out of control

but in audio you can see why it makes sense

visual basic is not usable really for spreadsheets very easily

it's really like if you had cables and pedals, but you can write OO classes to replace "pedals"

so you're inventing pedals and wiring them up

which is what you're used to doing physically

yeah the problem is when they define a fixed set of pedals that are turing complete and then don't let you make your own pedals

so yes you can compute, but it's a mess

yeah you have to be able to have both

have you tried unity?

i have not

that's similar, but without wires

instead you get a 3d modelling tool to make a "world"

and then you write your code into classes

entities i suppose

and you drag and drop the classes onto your objects to make them do stuff

yeah

and all the public properties show up in the UI as sliders and text fields and dropdowns

so you're kind of "playing your game" while actually writing the code for it

that sounds pretty awesome actually

it's quite fun

i don't see any reason why business webapps can't be made that way

you can write the code in either JS, C# or some language they made up, from memory

because then everyone would do it and we wouldn't have jobs 😉

lol

we'd be working on backend functionality

making new features, making things more efficient to save costs, etc

honestly, since i moved to hoplon and adopted clj on the front and backend

most of the time i spend messing around with things is dealing with other people's stuff

yeah that's true

it's not like it used to be with crazy jquery webapps

spending days to figure out why this button sometimes doesn't do anything when you press it

or whatever

"used to be" - company i worked for bought a crazy russian jquery web app sitting on jade/node templates about 2 months ago

ppl are still doing it...

gross

that's job security i guess

if you're coming from the gross jquery world

it takes some time to find, then learn both cljs and then hoplon

yeah

and there are so many things

there are definitely many things

there are like hundreds of web frameworks

there aren't that many truly different web framework approaches though

true

just lots of people riffing on the same chords over and over

but most frameworks have lots of DSLs and other incidental complexity to learn

templates and controllers and whatnots

mmm

that's one thing i think we should update in the javelin docs

<--- reformed drupal developer

i know all about incidental complexity

have the docs concentrate on the javelin functions, not the macros

then show how the macros provide syntax sugar separately

yeah, i'm in two minds about the docs

on the one hand, they are generally *accurate*

like ((formula (fn [x y] (+ x y)) a b) vs (cell= (+ a b))

on the other hand, it is hard to "get it" when you're coming from a JS framework background

actually, the blog post on splint js really helped me

yeah you can't use macros in js

so the splint.js needs to use the functions only

but the blog post specifically clearly shows moving through progressively less bad tactics to achieve the same thing

ah right

we should link to that blog post in the javelin readme

hahaha

^^ me graduating from jquery to hoplon/javelin 😛

nice owl dude

nailed it

haha, i wish i could take the credit for that >.<

when i first looked at javelin it was like "oh yeah, i can see how you can make 2 from 1 + 1, but can i really build a whole site with that?"

for a really long time i had this suspicious that i'd run across "something" that i just couldn't do well and the whole thing would fall apart somehow

obviously every day that goes by without everything falling apart makes that less of an issue

but i dunno how you tackle that with docs in a world of hundreds of shiny frameworks making big claims about solving all your problems for you 😕

it's very tricky trying to find the minimum viable framework

you don't want to end up painting yourself into a corner and end up with a ton of work invested in something that has a fatal flaw that was hidden

not at all

that's one reason why we went with jquery as the bottom layer

even more than that, i want to be able to use some of that ton of work as a launchpad for the next project too!

at least then you can get out of a fix with some jquery plugin if you need to

but i think we're slowly converging on a better thing

don't need jquery anymore

yeah, i'm personally not that bothered by having jquery there, but i know not everyone is ok with that

yeah the only issue i have with it is that we get tied to its api too tightly

like when jquery makes breaking changes we have to make breaking changes sometimes

that's totally fair

and that is bad for the library ecosystem

but then browsers will just adopt the jquery api anyway

so...

i suppose in some areas its much easier to avoid jquery than others

also hoplon doesn't even touch on all the things that jquery is for

yeah just the dom standardization

which is less and less important probably as time goes on with evergreen browsers

actually, i did a review of someone's first hoplon attempt, who is used to doing things "the jquery way"

and they made a lot of the same mistakes as i did

trying to traverse the dom or doing weird things with events

yeah you have to think kind of backwards sometimes

similar to the switch to functional programming from imperative i think

actually i didn't find that as hard as everyone makes out tbh 😛

maybe because people make such a big deal about it

i remember having a hard time with lazy sequences

i just used mapv everywhere for a while

lol

yeah but, whatever, think about how hard it was the first time you learned all the different ways to do things in OO

yeah c++ was crazy times

the friend members, and template programming

wow

really not into it

also, there always seems to be that one guy who loves making really complicated classes

😞

not just one guy

so i was expecting something like, 10x harder than all that, at least

if it was just one guy we could kill him

to justify all the resistance

so yeah, didn't really live up to my expectations

maybe you could do some "migration" docs :thinking_face:

but it's more like, responding to the things ppl say here in chat from different backgrounds

jquery, react, other cljs approaches, etc.

yeah

i have been looking at http://readme.io lately

for documenting things at work

ah cute

it has a really nice interface for editing

and it forces you to be organized

oooh, not that cheap though

not like a wiki where you can have old pages that are just hanging around

yeah

i like how it lets you make a real hierarchical structure

vs a web that you make in a wiki

docs really need to be like a book i think

so you can easily manage keeping it up to date and so on

docs are hard

with chapters and sections and all that

and a freakin table of contents lol

and yeah, my experiences with wikis is that out of date, broken info always gets left lying around in nooks and crannys

it would be cool maybe to have an electron app that gives the http://readme.io interface

but edits files in a git repo

maybe a github wiki even

but generating the table of contents and all that

keeping everything well organized

it would be super easy to make little electron apps that stitch apis like that together

i guess a program that takes markdown files organized as a book and compiles them into a github wiki

would be the first step

it's defs on my list of thing to try out

curious to see how you go

@micha i've used this before, for just getting a heirarchy of markdown up on something like github pages http://www.mkdocs.org

oh nice

i thnk i would want something that enforces no orphaned pages

could be built on top of that it looks like

for sure

also, there's like a million static site generators out there

like everything must be in the table of contents if it exists

yeah true

if your main requirements are markdown + automatic TOC

https://github.com/hashobject/perun this guy too

i reckon you can avoid the monthly fee

yeah also edit-in-place would be nice

but not required really

like http://readme.io you can edit in the page, which is kind of nice sometimes

that's true

on the flipside, when i'm doing commercial things i tend to ask ppl to PR docs with technical info in them

i did see that cljsjs has something ready to go for this https://yabwe.github.io/medium-editor/

ah, well

also i g2g

it's like 3:30am here

damn tz

haha see you later!

catch