learn4haskell VS Elm

There are a lot of really good "learn by doing" initiatives out there which are also theory heavy, even in the hardest languages (like this kind of thing for Haskell). Learning by immersion is the way they teach language in a hurry, and to learn a programming language in a hurry immersion is still the best teacher (in the form of a lot of hands-on projects that force you to handle theoretical concepts to complete them). It's not just the fun of making things and problem solving, but also of putting the big picture together and increasing what you can do. I bet you can find immersion projects like that on GitHub (or the internet in general) for almost any language or framework (and good textbooks are similar).

If you’d like to have the team look at free learning material to gage team wide adoption, I created a video series that used this really nice repo https://github.com/kowainik/learn4haskell

If reading books isn’t exactly your thing, here are some Haskell courses that should get you writing Haskell as fast as possible. There are two options to choose from here: something like Type Classes or learn4haskell can be very useful for getting started with the Haskell syntax and basic language constructs, while the more university-focused courses from Erik Meijer or Graham Hutton will help you start thinking like a functional programmer.

I think you might benefit a lot from going through short materials like Learn4Haskell. Your questions are all answerable there.

If you are already advanced in other programming languages, this course will get your feet wet: https://github.com/kowainik/learn4haskell

I am doing this course https://github.com/kowainik/learn4haskell is from a past event, but in my opinion, the content is excellent and I am loving it so far, also the repo owners still check and give feedback which I think is amazing

For Haskell most people read a book, http://learnyouahaskell.com/ or few other ones, I went through a bit but I started loosing focus just reading. This https://github.com/kowainik/learn4haskell helped me to get through that, really nice gamified learning path.

Learn4Haskell - Great for getting your feet wet with Haskell's syntax, and the fundamental typeclasses. They teach the concepts, and give you exercises on Haskell files which I find really neat. Akin to vim tutor. You can also run test cases which I found helpful.

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/