Sharetribe VS Elm

you can build your marketplace quite easy with https://www.sharetribe.com

For marketplaces I’ve used Sharetribe https://www.sharetribe.com, and Arcadier https://www.arcadier.com/express/. Both quite good and with easy to use templates.

Sharetribe: https://www.sharetribe.com does seem more like a C2C marketplace than something that would allow a merchant to have a store with multiple products

Just because nobody else has mentioned it: https://www.sharetribe.com/

> For an MVP, I'd choose what I'm most familiar with and can be fastest with.

That is absolutely the takeaway here. Use the technology you are familiar with and/or can be fastest with. MVPs are risky enough, don't add in "oh, gosh, I have to learn the tech (libraries, deployments, monitoring, database access, etc)" as well.

The only case where I'd pick a new tech for an MVP is when there is an existing open source or free project that I could use that would obviously get the project shipped faster by providing extensive pre-built functionality.

For example, I once used Sharetribe https://github.com/sharetribe/sharetribe even though I was only an intermediate ruby programmer because, after time spent evaluating it and other solutions, it had functionality that could get us shipped faster.

From "git init" to our first beta customer was 1 month of time. Then to our first paying customer was 1 more month. One developer (me). To be fair, my co-founder had done a ton of market development before I started coding, so the initial market/feature discovery was done; that's a huge part of any MVP.

This is such a valuable question for other languages too. I wonder if there's a repo/resource listing such projects..

I asked a similar question about ruby some time ago, and came across one good recommendation (https://github.com/sharetribe/sharetribe), but would love to have many more. I'm also self-taught and feel I haven't read enough great ruby code!

Use https://www.sharetribe.com/ . Your best bet

2. Tools to build a marketplace. Which, besides being open source, how is this idea different than https://www.sharetribe.com/?

One "competitor" that comes to mind is https://www.sharetribe.com/. Originally, Sharetribe was just a public github repo anyone could clone, and you had to pay if you wanted any support setting it up. Now it seems like they have a more standard SaaS 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/