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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

If Elm didn't also exist, I'd almost agree with you.

In an ideal world I'm sure a lot of us would love to work with Elm, but the reality in a commercial situation is often that the choice of language is driven by factors like: how widely used/well known it is, what the availability of libraries for it is like, how easy it is to hire developers with experience for.

This unfortunately makes languages like Elm and Clojurescript unlikely to be chosen in a lot of situations (e.g. as I understand it, the JS interop story with Elm isn't amazing, so you can't just use JS libraries with it).

Typescript is close enough to plain Javascript to not scare people off (I'd be willing to bet any JS developer could pick it up in a few hours) and can almost be considered in the same light as vanilla JS in such a decision, yet brings with it the advantages of a fairly decent type system.

As I've said elsewhere, it's definitely not perfect, but for developers in a position where other, more "esoteric" compile-to-JS languages aren't likely to be accepted, Typescript probably represents the best choice of bringing a decent amount of sanity and predictability to codebases.

(This isn't meant to be having a go at the parent BTW, it's just something I've been thinking about a bit and the comment jogged my memory!)

You can totally use JS libraries with Elm. Source: we do it all the time at NoRedInk, and we've been using Elm in production for our millions of users (as our go-to for all front-end work at the company, not just as a side thing) for the better part of a year now. :)

Details about our experience with Elm in production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2FtMbb-nLs

That's interesting to know! Thanks

Just for the obligatory record: Purescript is basically "Elm evolved". Everything Elm does, Purescript does better (FFI for example is such a chore in Elm). Drawback: the learning curve is basically as steep as Haskell's.

My experience with Purescript/pulp was rather negative. Basic commands were throwing errors (pulp init IIRC) so I decided to not even consider it for anything serious.

The tooling is not perfect, that's absolutely true. I have to say though that any imperfections (which are going to get fixed anyway) are well worth it if you want a pure strongly typed language for the web. There's simply nothing better (except the full-blown Haskell-to-js compilers, like GHCJS and Haste of course).

I recommend you try again and file a bug or look for help in irc if something breaks again (although I've never seen pulp init throw an error).

My memory could be off (on which command failed). I think I still have the repo on my home machine, so I could re-visit and file a bug report. At the time I kept pursuing elm instead. Reports of better FFI with JS is why I had explored PureScript.

Update: The bug is with pulp server https://github.com/bodil/pulp/issues/133

Cool, does it work for you now?

Being backed by Microsoft is another strong point of TS for some.

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