modern-editor VS Elm

> "building a text-annotation based app"

I'm going to assume that you are talking about a desktop-based webapp that is also responsive, and not a native app. I also believe you when you say that you do not know where you are getting into.

I have 10+ years of experience doing front-end, with probably over a dozen React packages self-published in npm, and also tried making a rich text editor ~6 years back[1]. I actually recommend starting with no framework at all (please read on).

Creating a rich text editor might be the hardest thing you can do in "normal" front-end (excluding some more advanced "frontend" fields like 3D or games). You can either manipulate raw cursors, which will be very tricky because I'm not even sure you have access to all the right APIs (specially on mobile), or you can attempt to use Contenteditable, which is a hell of its own[2].

"All problems start with caret placing and multi browser support" [3]

That said, I believe 90% of the complexity of your app will be here, around the actual interaction with the or <div contenteditable> that you will be using. For that, no framework will really help you, at all. So my recommendation is to first get that working, which will take weeks/months and hundreds or thousands of lines of code, and then worry about placing the little hovering boxes in their place (the "UI"), which is like 10 lines of JS/CSS[4].<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/franciscop/modern-editor" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/franciscop/modern-editor</a><p>[2] <a href="https://answerly.io/blog/my-pain-developing-a-wysiwyg-editor-with-contenteditable/" rel="nofollow">https://answerly.io/blog/my-pain-developing-a-wysiwyg-editor...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27938702" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27938702</a><p>[4] <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/4495626/938236" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/q/4495626/938236</a>

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/