Well things on the client side can be sometimes be mutable. No one gets around the fact the DOM is a mutable only object. But besides that, the Fulcro library has labelled one of their feature's a 'Mutation'. Which was probably a bad choice, but it has nothing to do with the immutability of the underlying cljs object that it uses for that "Mutation". You'll notice the example is using 'swap!'. That means it's modifying an atom; Where an atom is an interface to make changes to the immutable object it holds. So really 'swap!' takes the change request, constructs a new version the original thing held in the atom, with changes, then 'swap's it with the original item inside the atom. The original thing was never changed (no changes to existing slots in memory). Hence clojure's things are immutable, and they are in Fulcro too, accept when changing the DOM tree.