Fluture VS fp-ts

My name is Aldwin. I'm back-end-leaning full-stack (web-) developer with over 13 years of full time professional experience at various software development agencies. Besides that, I have years of hobby-programming and open-source experience, with Fluture[1] being my most well-received.

I've been leading small teams for the last eight years, focusing on developer enabling work such as process management, devops, software architecture, and coaching.

I'm very passionately in particular about functional programming, and I'm hoping to coach teams when it comes to the cross-over between functional programming and software architecture - something a lot of developers who are new to FP struggle with.

Although I have been involved in a huge variety of software types, I'm particularly well-experienced when it comes to real-time, offline-first web-applications and real-time data processing.

[1]: https://github.com/fluture-js/Fluture

I think that it is fine to code perfectly functional apps using TypeScript with React Native and React. You will have a huge community to support you with documentation, libraries, and available labor. Yes, the language has a lot of soundness holes and misses a lot of useful features like pattern matching or type classes but, for me, it is a valid trade-off. There are libraries for better FP programming in TypeScript like fp-ts, io-ts, and fluture.

Fortunately, as it has been shown in this article, it’s definitely possible to use functional programming with plain JavaScript. However, if you really want to dive deeper into this paradigm while using JavaScript, you’ll probably want to use some already existing functional libraries such as Sanctuary, Fluture, Ramda and others.

This is great news for functionally-minded libraries such as Ramda, Sanctuary, Fluture, and many more. But it also makes some vanilla JavaScript nicer, for example:

I think it’s great that functional programming is making its way into traditional imperative languages - even JavaScript (I recently came across https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/ as a pretty extreme example)

Elixir/Erlang has function-level pattern matching, which I really like. I’ve yet to see it anywhere else, though my understanding is it came from Prolog.

While I certainly agree, I've found that this is often an indication of too-complex an architecture, and a fundamental re-think being necessary. I've had projects that depend on [fp-ts], which end up incredibly generic-heavy, but still make it entirely through a typecheck(not build- typescript's just worse at that than other tools like esbuild) in seconds-at-worse.

Obviously depends on your organization/project/application, but I do like these things as complexity-smells.

[fp-ts]: https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/

Unlike more comprehensive functional libraries like fp-ts, each module can be imported and resolved separately. If you just need options, simply add the option module and you're good to go.

While it's quite abstract, I believe it may be useful to those of you who is interested to learn more about functional programming [in Typescript] and also get more intuition on diverse programming ideas. I use fp-ts as a functional programming library there.

The library for TypeScript that this is influenced by is here:

https://github.com/gcanti/fp-ts

Interesting how both languages with this library converge to a similar syntax, due to heavy use of functions.

Learn something that pays the bill first - nowadays it's Golang/Rust react/typescript. Then you can try some pure fp libs like fp-ts and fp-core.rs, and look through existing scala cats docs. If you'll feel bad about it - that's totally fine and expectable, fp takes a paradigm shift and not that many dev able to shift their brains way of thought due to basic psychological rigidity) (inability to change habits and to modify concepts/attitudes once developed). And that's purely a staffing and management issue - folks hired randoms out of the blue, and called 'em a team.

fp-ts, a library that caters to functional programming in TypeScript, comes with some micro-abstractions that already solve a few of our needs.

Also, don't underestimate how powerful TypeScript can be in capable hands (namely Giulio Canti's). Check out fp-ts, for instance.

You are able to type it using function overloads, an example can be found here - link, line 236.

looks like more ergonomic/focused version of fp-ts[1]

[1] https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/