audience-minutes VS Elm

Here's my personal goto:

Find some minimal CSS framework. My preference is Skeleton [0] or Bootstrap [1]. The key is just finding something minimal that works without too much fuss. Personally, I rather have a minimal framework provide 'responsiveness' so I don't have to worry about it but I also want it to get out of the way of anything I do.

Use JQuery [2]. Don't rely on CSS for animations or interactivity. In theory CSS does a lot. In practice it's a nightmare to use and to get it play well with whatever else I'm doing in the page.

Write in "bare" HTML and "vanilla" JavaScript. Don't use a static site generator and don't use a JavaScript framework.

Port in JavaScript libraries as needed. Some of the ones I tend to use are numeric.js [3], downlaod.js [4] and audience-minutes [5]. If you're doing spreadsheet things, maybe there's some JS package out there that will help.

Doing "raw" HTML/"vanilla" JavaScript makes me effectively unhirable but for limited scope side projects where I have full control and want to minimize bit-rot, this is fine.

The point is to create something that's minimal and focuses on functionality. The CSS is just there to make it not look like a Web 1.0 page but otherwise steps out of the way to focus on the actual usage of the application.

For context, here are some projects where I've used this philosophy (all open source, feel free to pilfer): Noixer [6], Resonator Voyant Tarot [7], Boston Train Track (now defunct) [8], CalebHarrington.com (an artist friend) [9], What Is This License [10], HSV Hero [11].

[0] http://getskeleton.com/

[1] https://getbootstrap.com/

[2] https://jquery.com/

[3] https://github.com/sloisel/numeric

[4] https://github.com/rndme/download

[5] https://github.com/berthubert/audience-minutes

[6] https://mechaelephant.com/noixer/

[7] https://abetusk.github.io/ResonatorVoyantTarot/

[8] https://github.com/abetusk/bostontraintrack

[9] https://calebharrington.com/

[10] https://mechaelephant.com/whatisthislicense/

[11] https://mechaelephant.com/hsvhero

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/