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Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

If type safety is what you miss, why not to use some transpiler like TypeScript?

http://www.typescriptlang.org/Tutorial

Then you're not writing JavaScript, which was OP's concern. TypeScript is fine (although Elm, Swift, and Haskell are more interesting, IMO).

Look at purescript. In order to install this madness you need to install not less than 5 package managers, but you might like it.

The situation has improved since cabal install was required.

npm install -g pulp purescript

should be enough now.

TypeScript is very close to normal JavaScript. It's basically just JavaScript + type annotations which a compiler can check.

Compilation phase removes the annotations, after that point it is pure JavaScript.

How are Swift and Haskell relevant for client side web development?

Edit: Removed Elm

Elm's only target is the browser/JS.

I stand corrected. Never heard of Elm before, but I assumed from context it's non-JavaScript targeting language like Swift and Haskell.

Are you aware of GHCJS, Haskell-to-JS, compiler? In the new and rather popular "build/dependency manager"[1] for Haskell, named Stack, you can now quite easily install this compiler.

And I think it is only a matter of time till someone writes a Swift-to-JS compiler (Apple might already have it on it's radar).

[1]: I know it is not a "build/dependency manager", but I don't know how to call better in for sake of this discussion.

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