Github-Ranking VS Elm

5th highest number of stars of any repo on GitHub 🙃

This explains the uneven distribution of Haskell applications, but this does not explain why the distribution is more even in other languages. But is that even the case? You mention Python, and Python happens to be THE language of choice for data science projects, so I would expect to also see an uneven distribution there. And Java happens to be THE language of choice for writing Android applications, so I would expect an uneven distribution there too. And Rust is a systems programming language, so I would expect games and other things that really need to run fast. Let's look at lists of popular projects by language:

The repo I chose was Github-Ranking, a repo to check the most starred and forked GitHub repos of the day. The link can be found here: https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking. I picked this repo because I've never explored the most popular repos before and this allowed me to see what a lot of people are working on.

Clocking in at 190K Github stars React's github ranking is easily ranked in the top 10.

Here's a few other tools that are written in Perl, sorted by GitHub popularity: https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

Actually, that repo has lists like this for most languages: https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking

Elm [1] is based on a similar idea. Build your app from pure functions that return HTML tags.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/

You also wouldn't really be creating your own new programing language. You would be creating something that can run JavaScript by following JavaScript standards and syntax. You might be able to add some non-standard features of your own on top of those standards, or include your own standard library of helpers or utilities, but you can't completely make a new or alternative language and then load it in the browser (or at least not by reimplementing ECMAScript standards... you actually can make your own language that runs within any Javascript enviroment, if you provide an interpreter or compiler that transforms it into valid JS. Some people have done something like this, eg Elm: https://elm-lang.org/).

You should at least have a look at https://elm-lang.org/ it is a pure functional language like Haskell (although with fewer fancy syntax/type classes) but it has some lovely libraries for visualisation and even with plain elm (+ elm-ui) doing string transformations can be easily done.

I get it. However, the whole point of using Unions to narrow your types, ensure only a set of possible scenarios can occur, and only access data of a particular union when it’s safe to do so. That’s some of what pattern matching can provide, and 100% of what using switch statements in TypeScript with their Discriminated Unions can provide. Yes, it’s not 100% exhaustive, but TypeScript is not soundly typed, and even Elm which is still has the same issue TypeScript does: You’re running in JavaScript where anything is possible. So it’s good enough to build with and much better than what you had.

The beauty of a language like Elm (and other lambda-calculus / functional programming inspired languages) is that there's very little transformation involved in going from an idea to code. And that seems to have a big impact on getting things done.

I think the most fun and approachable way for beginners to build games with functional programming is with Elm [1].

See a few (small, demo) games built by the community in [2] .

Notice Elm has abandoned the FRP approach in favor of Model-View-Update [3].

[1] https://elm-lang.org/