react-elm-components VS Elm

They were considered, I was on the team that considered them. (I work at Culture Amp and at one point was leading the Design System team).

To be clear: embedding Elm in React is easy (we host the main NPM library for doing so: https://github.com/cultureamp/react-elm-components). But embedding React in Elm is harder, as Elm doesn't give any easy "escape hatches" to interact with native JS code.

The main opportunity is to use Web Components. Elm knows how to render any HTML component, including `x-my-custom-button`, which could render using React or something else. We looked into options for this, including prototyping https://www.npmjs.com/package/backstitch as a way to embed our React components as Web Components for consumption in Elm. (No open source packages existed to do this at the time).

We also did quite a deep dive on using Stencil, which has a React-like API, to create web components for both React and Elm - even including publishing new plugins for the ecosystem to generate Elm bindings for your web components. Kevin went into some of the detail for this in the post if you're interested.

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/