laminar VS fp-ts

The main (and only) criticism I’ve ever heard about graphql in the companies I worked for was that it is very js-oriented all the best libs/frameworks for it are for react frontend / node server mostly.

Backend scala / php devs looked at it with distaste in their eyes, coming up with various reasons why its not a good idea.

And to be fair with tools like openapi / grpc a lot of the benefits of graphql can be replicated.

Even if they are clumsy and fragmented compared to it in my eyes, they still work well enough and keep devs in all camps happy enough, and compromise as they say is “when everyone is equally unhappy”.

Now placed in situations like this I am usually forced to reimplement graphql tooling with the chosen api tech (for example https://github.com/ovotech/laminar) and if me as a single dev could do it, then I’d wager if there was stronger tech leadership, all the other tech tribes could just smooth the edges that they didn’t like for using graphql in their respective languages … but sadly that has not been my experience.

I use it extensively in prod. Well the superset that is OpenApi. It enables contract first development where any change to the api is done in the schema fist, and then implemented by the clients/server.

Since we have tooling[0] that validates requests and responses at runtime, the clients can be absolutely sure of what they receive (we through 500 if the server attempts to respond with an undocumented respond) And the server is also sure about the shape of the requests. This allows us to validate everything at compile time too, generating typescript types for both client and server.

And since we have similar tooling regarding our data stores (typescript types for sql queries) most of the time if there is a bug, the code would simply not compile - pretty nifty!

[0] - https://github.com/ovotech/laminar

If the api has some contract with it OpenApi / Swagger / etc, its surprisingly easy to write a parser that would convert those to typescript types. TS has an awesome use as a library itself where you can write the ast with, and then tell it to convert it to code.

We use it to great effect ourselves, by generating types for axios.

https://github.com/ovotech/laminar/tree/main/packages/lamina...

Now granted, you’re now trusting the api writers with their contract, but if its another team in the org we’ve found it to be warranted.

I think it’s great that functional programming is making its way into traditional imperative languages - even JavaScript (I recently came across https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/ as a pretty extreme example)

Elixir/Erlang has function-level pattern matching, which I really like. I’ve yet to see it anywhere else, though my understanding is it came from Prolog.

While I certainly agree, I've found that this is often an indication of too-complex an architecture, and a fundamental re-think being necessary. I've had projects that depend on [fp-ts], which end up incredibly generic-heavy, but still make it entirely through a typecheck(not build- typescript's just worse at that than other tools like esbuild) in seconds-at-worse.

Obviously depends on your organization/project/application, but I do like these things as complexity-smells.

[fp-ts]: https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/

Unlike more comprehensive functional libraries like fp-ts, each module can be imported and resolved separately. If you just need options, simply add the option module and you're good to go.

While it's quite abstract, I believe it may be useful to those of you who is interested to learn more about functional programming [in Typescript] and also get more intuition on diverse programming ideas. I use fp-ts as a functional programming library there.

The library for TypeScript that this is influenced by is here:

https://github.com/gcanti/fp-ts

Interesting how both languages with this library converge to a similar syntax, due to heavy use of functions.

Learn something that pays the bill first - nowadays it's Golang/Rust react/typescript. Then you can try some pure fp libs like fp-ts and fp-core.rs, and look through existing scala cats docs. If you'll feel bad about it - that's totally fine and expectable, fp takes a paradigm shift and not that many dev able to shift their brains way of thought due to basic psychological rigidity) (inability to change habits and to modify concepts/attitudes once developed). And that's purely a staffing and management issue - folks hired randoms out of the blue, and called 'em a team.

fp-ts, a library that caters to functional programming in TypeScript, comes with some micro-abstractions that already solve a few of our needs.

Also, don't underestimate how powerful TypeScript can be in capable hands (namely Giulio Canti's). Check out fp-ts, for instance.

You are able to type it using function overloads, an example can be found here - link, line 236.

looks like more ergonomic/focused version of fp-ts[1]

[1] https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/