bolt-js VS ramda

Try a Slack bot. They (Slack) have a wrapper project and example using node/express. I think this is it. And MongoDB has their new(ish?) Atlas app which acts as a GUI/terminal for a freely-host database.

bolt

Yeah I’m planning to work on a PoC using Bolt: https://github.com/slackapi/bolt-js

I’m confident I can get something working reasonably quickly. I was hoping to get some Slack boilerplate out of the way, but I’m sure it’s not too obnoxious.

Also since posting I did find a generic chat bot framework that works with Slack and a few other chat systems: https://github.com/Yoctol/bottender

Even so I may give in and write it all from scratch to avoid excess dependencies.

Let's install the project dependencies. Our main dependency is Bolt, the official Slack framework for building Slack apps with JavaScript.

It helps that the tool we’re building on is welcoming developers to their platform with open arms. As Slack’s rivalry with Microsoft Teams heats up, the company is increasingly touting their app marketplace as a unique selling point. So much so, they’ve even set up their own investment fund aimed at Slack apps and released their own Javascript framework to make building native apps easier.

JavaScript is great for point-free programming! Make sure you check out Ramda.js https://ramdajs.com/

It’s fun in the sense that solving a puzzle is fun, but I avoid it for anything I need to maintain long-term.

But it’s good practice for understanding combinators which is useful for some kinds of problems.

This is very cool. I remember I got sucked into things like Ramda going down this functional programming rabbit hole :-)

https://ramdajs.com/

To create our pipeline, I'm going to use the pipe function from the NodeJS ramda library instead of building my own.

Other libraries to check out are pratica and ramda

I recently took ownership of the new types/ramda repo. This repo is re-exported by @types/ramda and is the first step to bringing type definitions for ramda in-house. We're already hard at work correcting major issues, adding full currying support, and general bug fixes

I'm going to be honest. You probably don't need to use currying in JavaScript. In fact, trying to fit it in your code is going to do more harm than good, unless it's just for fun. Currying only becomes useful when you fully embrace functional programming, which, in JavaScript, means using a library like Ramda instead of the standard built-in functions.

Lodash gets so many things wrong I’d rather not see it in most projects. I appreciate a good utility library for JS projects but my go-to choice has to be Ramda[1]. Every function it exports is curried and works great with pipe which enables me to write highly reusable and composable functions in pointfree notation. I have never been as productive with lodash, and I find the functional style easier to read

[1] https://ramdajs.com/

Do note though that ramda is different from rambda. 👍 (Granted they are very similar!)