Elm VS purescript

Recently a friend recommended me Elm, a pure functional language for developing web applications. I'd like to compare it to JavaScript and show how the functional paradigm can work in practical applications.

If you want to combine functional programming with the web i'd consider Elm which seems to have a fairly decent documentation and a good official guide.

Well, but the website tries to encourage you to use Elm. The guide explicitly asks you to "give Elm a shot and see what you think". So it seems to me that Evan does want Elm to be popular.

I really like Elm [0] and write all my side projects in it. There are many reasons I like it, but the one that probably plays best around here is that it feels like a very learn-it-for-life type language. It has a release cadence measured in years (the latest version, 0.19.10, was released in October 2019!), and a community that has adapted to match. Elm doesn't release shiny new features often, or even necessarily ever again, but it has everything I need to make every web game I could possibly think of already so that's a good thing.

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

As for other languages, I wrote one for Elm (https://elm-lang.org/) inspired by ts-rs: https://crates.io/crates/elm_rs

Also check out the follow-up issue!

negative numbers not being allowed in pattern matches ... prevents me from shooting myself in the foot

Pretty much. I keep asking people "Why not Elm?" ( https://elm-lang.org/ ) but no one has a very good answer.

The weird thing to me is that the two main customers or consumers of front-end programming (publishers and users) never see and do not care about the underlying language or implementation! Businesses and other orgs (schools, NGOs, etc.) as well as individuals (FB users, WordPress blogs, etc.) never see under the hood (except when something goes wrong or they deliberately click "View Source", eh?)

Ergo, all this whole Javascript ecosystem is solely for the developers. It's like a giant and largely irrelevant MMORG that we play that produces mostly-working websites and apps almost as a side effect.

"Change my mind?"

What about Math.imul? Here is some ongoing discussion...

The point is, Cardano is a polyglot blockchain and does a lot of work with not only Rust, but also JS+PureScript and several other languages.

Here are the release-notes including the mentioned changes: https://github.com/purescript/purescript/releases/tag/v0.15.0

I was curious about when that happened- apparently, early last year: https://github.com/purescript/purescript/pull/4085

It currently has done experiments in the backend (link). Sadly, none of this is ready for production yet. Good thing is that we have purescript for the backend, who is indeed very similar to Elm and Haskell! You should give it a look!

Alternative to Elm can be PureScript, ClojureScript, ReasonML, ReScript, and other languages that compile to JavaScript. There are also newer and interesting languages that are still in an explorative state like Ren or Derw.