coffeescript VS Elm

That said, there are ways to embrace the JS ecosystem without actually using JavaScript. Many popular languages have transpilers that will convert code written in that particular language into something that will run natively in a web browser (in other words, JavaScript). Even TypeScript is a language that gets transpiled into JavaScript, so it's not that outrageous of a concept, it just gets more difficult to do the further you get away from languages that don't already look like JavaScript.

As a front-end web developer, do you still use CoffeeScript or jQuery? Unlikely, as TypeScript, ES/TC39 and Babel (and the retirement of Internet Explorer thanks to @codepo8 and his EDGE team) have helped to transform JavaScript into some kind of a modern programming language.

CoffeeScript

On the other hand, companies choose React because that's where all the developers are. If you want to build something that can be maintained years from now, you better not choose the next hype train that goes straight to nowhere (remember CoffeeScript ?). You want something battle tested that has stood the test of time, where you won't have trouble finding developers to scale once you need to. And nobody ever got fired for choosing React.

http://coffeescript.org/#expressions

this comes from Lisp and makes a lot of things easier. Obviously this was not implemented in ES6 because it would break compatibility and there is also some problems with implicit returns that made the feature a bit weird

I wonder if a syntax like this for JS would work:

const eldest = if (24>41) { escape "Liz" } else { escape "Ike" }

with "escape" working like a mix of "break" and "return". But even then this is likely to cause incompatibilities

Coffeescript[1] was a flavour of JS syntax meant to look similar to Ruby syntax. You just compiled it back to JS. It was nice for working on Rails projects since it made everything feel more “cohesive”.

I assume this project is here for older Coffeescript[1] projects who want to start using typescript, and need access to interfaces/types that were present in old CS files.

[1] https://coffeescript.org/

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

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

elm is a lovely lang. it would be nice to have modern APIs on it.

here's the project for new eyes:

https://github.com/elm/core

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/).

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/