Google Web Toolkit VS Elm

But there are frameworks like GWT or Vaadin for Java, but none of them really took off afaik, I've never seen a job posting with either of these.

FYI, in Java there's this old framework called GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which I use daily at my job. It provides a Java frontend solution which compiles Java to Javascript. (absolutely cursed)

I have not much experience with React and other frontend techs, last time I did something in that space I used GWT... (to be honest, I choose flutter because I wanted to avoid touching JS).

The JavaScript library for the project (not on GitHub) is built with the GWT (http://www.gwtproject.org/) toolkit.

Transpiled languages were nothing new to the web dev community. Let’s see - we had CoffeeScript, Flow, Elm, GWT counts? sure why not, and of course TS (and probably more I’ve neglected). So we must ask ourselves why TS won, right? Well, at least I did.

You might want to try GWT (http://www.gwtproject.org) but it's class library is a bit different than usual java.

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/