Converter VS excoptional

The longer story is that st-material-ui incorporates https://github.com/ScalablyTyped/Converter/pull/487 in order to get much, much cleaner API. You'll probably have seen the fake literal types, some rewriting from type unions to inheritance, things like that.

Given that you want interoperability with js, I'd start by playing with https://scalablytyped.org/, then, play with the scalajs-react demos (https://github.com/ScalablyTyped/ScalaJsReactDemos) and the slinky demos (https://github.com/ScalablyTyped/SlinkyDemos). There are some libraries that scalablytyped doesn't support pretty well but you can leverage https://github.com/nafg/scalajs-facades for those.

ScalaJS is awesome. Really solid and mature project, can totally recommend.

The only thing that can be annoying is when you want to have a typesafe interface and have to write a lot of adapters for javascript libraries.

Fortunately there is even a project that can make use of typescript interfaces for those libraries, so that you can use them from ScalaJS more or less automatically: https://scalablytyped.org/

I'm using it mostly for full-stack web development with ScalaJS (https://www.scala-js.org) in the frontend (https://outwatch.github.io/docs/readme.html) and in the backend with AWS lambdas.

The ecosystem is currently in the process of porting all the libraries to Scala 3. So if you're new to Scala, I'd recommend to start with Scala 2, which is rock-solid and already very powerful.

I never worked with SQLAlchemy. But on the scala database side, popular libraries are Doobie (https://tpolecat.github.io/doobie) and Quill (https://getquill.io). Keep in mind that these are for Scala on the JVM. On the ScalaJS side I'm using the javascript library pg. But I'd like to try if it works well with Prisma soon.

The nice thing about ScalaJS is, that you can use Javascript libraries. And if there are typescript facades, then you can transpile these to Scala and use them in a type safe way (https://scalablytyped.org).

> I mean Scala because I guess it actually has it, but worth pointing out it's like 30 LOC to define one for JS, depending on how many convenience methods you want.

Here's one I wrote: https://github.com/sbernheim4/excoptional

I fully believe it to be one of the best Option implementations in JS/TS

https://github.com/sbernheim4/excoptional is an option object for js/ts

One benefit to keeping your value wrapped in a Maybe is that as you transform and manipulate the value and pass it around in your system, you leave it up to the last place in your system that uses the value to define the fallback value in the case of a None rather than defining a fallback value part way through and establish a convention that the fallback value means nothing was found at some other part of your system.

Another benefit to using Maybes is that you avoid the rigamarole of null checks at every call site where you want to use the value. If you have a function that returns null or a value, whenever you call that function you'll always have to add an if guard to validate it's not null. If it is, that function itself may return null, and callers to it will again have to implement the same check.

I wrote a JS implementation of the Option object and the readme has lots of specific examples about these benefits: https://github.com/sbernheim4/excoptional