rescript-model-view-poc VS Elm

Not that I can share unfortunately. But here is the implementation I got the idea from. https://github.com/mjal/rescript-use-tea/blob/master/src/Use...

I defined the actions a little differently and followed the rescript-react pattern of having effects return an Option of a cleanup fn but most of the idea is there.

Looking around just now I also found this PoC of someone doing a very similar thing but all inline with react. https://github.com/mishaszu/rescript-model-view-poc/tree/mai...

Really the only jump you need from react to the elm architecture is having the reducer be (State, Action) -> ('State, Effects) instead of simply returning the new state alone. The then you have a useEffect that invokes the side effect fns, passing in dispatch so they can send updates back to the reducer & so reducer stays pure. There are a bunch of different ways to set that up, and honestly a lot of react apps blunder into an accidental and incomplete version of this anyway it's such a natural model.

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/