# Writing Web3 Apps with Clojurescript
By [ophy.eth](https://paragraph.com/@ophy) · 2021-12-10
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Clojure has been my favorite language for a long time. It is not without its faults, but it is the language in which I can express my ideas in the most efficient way. It has a powerful macro system that lets you mold the language to your needs. Most Clojure code can run on the JVM as well as in a Javascript runtime (as Clojurescript). This lets us leverage two rich package ecosystems with a convenient lisp syntax.
While much of the code will be self-explanatory, a familiarity with Clojure (or other lisps) will be helpful.
Getting Started
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Writing Clojure code is pretty simple and doesn’t require much boilerplate. We will need a few dependencies though.
### Installing Dependencies
Install Clojure by following this guide:
[https://clojure.org/guides/getting\_started](https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started)
Then install shadow-cljs:
[https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs](https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs)
### Initialize Project
I like to keep all my projects under `~/Developer`, so I run this from there, but from whichever directory you want to create your project in, run the following code in your terminal:
npx create-cljs-project hello-web3
This will create a new directory called `hello-web3` and within it create some of the files we need to get started.
One of the quirks Clojurescript inherited from Java is namespacing and directory structure.
Create the following file: `src/main/helloweb3/frontend/app.js` and put this in it:
(ns helloweb3.frontend.app)
(defn init []
(println "Hello Web3"))
In `shadow-cljs.edn`, replace the empty `:builds` map with the following:
{
...
:builds
{:frontend
{:target :browser
:modules {:main {:init-fn helloweb3.frontend.app/init}}
}}}
Create the file `public/index.html`
hello web3
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*Originally published on [ophy.eth](https://paragraph.com/@ophy/writing-web3-apps-with-clojurescript)*