roc VS Elm

Their FAQ is an eminently reasonable breakdown of their choices:

https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md

I don't fully agree with all of the reasoning, but it's a reasonable position to stake.

If you forget what parametrisation and functions are, then Roc's modules look like they actually do that.

Reminds me of: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md#why-doesnt-...

> How would a user interface written in a functional language look?

Maybe you're not aware of Elm?

https://elm-lang.org

Elm is really functional, unlike the likes of React that are just partially, kind of functional.

There's an attempt at bringing Elm to the desktop, the Roc language... here's an UI example written in Roc:

https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/examples/gui/hello...

What are your thoughts on the direct descendant, Roc? [0] I know it's pre v0.1 so maybe you don't have any, but as a fellow Elm lover it seems pretty compelling on the surface albeit less directly frontend-dev focused.

[0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc

I might be misunderstanding something, but, for example, look at this "host"/platform: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/examples/cli/tui-platform/host.zig

You are not alone. The other day I was checking out a new programming language and the author rewrote the unsafe rust part to zig: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md#why-does-ro...

Check out Roc[0][1] by Richard Feldman; it's early-stages (perhaps earlier stages than Elm?) but from everything I've seen it looks a bit like a spiritual successor to Elm, though focused more on native applications (but still seems to have its sights set on webassembly support too)

[0] https://www.roc-lang.org

[1] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc

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/