Comment by jasim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasim | Hacker News Reader

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The killer app for OCaml is front-end webdev with Reason. Most new large-scale Javascript projects are using gradual typing with TypeScript, and the experience is not the same as having types natively. It gives you the safety and rigidity of types, but not as much the ability to think with types. These projects also toy around with immutability - using a library like Immutable.js which is a boxed data structure that needs explicit handling and conversion to and from native types, need to pick a state management library like Redux which implements a version of variants through constants and manual dispatch, and all these projects need large test suites to check for things that types would've caught and so on. A typed functional language eliminates almost all of these issues and grants more powers of abstraction. If not Haskell or OCaml, I suspect Elm has a good shot at it.

I'm all for new languages! If I remember correctly, the ideal one is Lispy with Hygienic macros, ML-like type system baked in, multi-core, good stdlib, and tools that don't stand in your way.

"The killer app for OCaml is front-end webdev with Reason."

I'll make a 1000$, 10 year bet with you that in 2028, if browsers still exist, ReasonML (or its successors) will be nowhere near mainstream status (which is the point we are discussing here). I like Reason, or at least the idea of it.

Javascript itself might incorporate more static typing in 2028 than today's version does, but I suggest the 'advances' will be relatively miniscule.

I hold hope, but not certainty!

I agree that JavaScript isn't going to change significantly, but fortunately it can be treated as a compiler's target platform, not only a source language.

We're not going to see any language supplant JavaScript in the browser. Dart got nowhere, and that was with the backing of Google. But there are already toolkits out there that compile down to JavaScript. GWT, for instance.

>We're not going to see any language supplant JavaScript in the browser. Dart got nowhere, and that was with the backing of Google.

Never say never (again. With apologies to Ian Fleming). Just because Dart couldn't do it (even with Google), doesn't mean that nothing else can. I, for one, hope something better does supplant JS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Say_Never_Again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming

I think the problem here is that OCaml/ReasonML is a relatively large language - the flip side to the nice syntactic sugar, and there's a paucity of material to get people into ReasonML if they haven't touched FP before (which for FP to take off is the target audience).

It is definitely not ideal, but they are happening. A few helpful resources:

Nik Graf has a free ReasonML course on Egghead.io, which has a lot of positive reviews from the community. https://egghead.io/courses/get-started-with-reason

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer has written "Exploring ReasonML and functional programming" which covers the language comprehensively. http://reasonmlhub.com/exploring-reasonml/

Web Development with ReasonML by J. David Eisenberg, published by Pragmatic Bookshelfis in the works. I read a few sample chapters and they're excellent for beginners: https://pragprog.com/book/reasonml/web-development-with-reas...

Jane Street wrote a set of 24 runnable exercises that teaches OCaml, and we ported it to ReasonML. It has been used for workshops and individual study and will get you upto speed on the paradigm quickly. https://github.com/protoship/learn-reasonml-workshop

You also have textbooks on OCaml, a lot of them openly accessible, including the venerable Real World OCaml. They are all listed in the awesome-ocaml repository: https://github.com/rizo/awesome-ocaml#books

There is vramana's awesome-reasonml repository that covers similar ground for Reason itself: https://github.com/vramana/awesome-reasonml

Going to plug a quick thing here :) I run a project called Byteconf - we have a free ReasonML conference coming up this Friday, streamed on Twitch: https://www.byteconf.com/reason-2018

> there's a paucity of material to get people into ReasonML

Believe it or not, it's even worse if you want to target native code and not JS.

I'm doing the ES6 + Immutable thing right now in some React apps. (I'd prefer to use TypeScript, but the codebases are too large to convert.)

It's an improvement over plain JS, but also a nightmare. For example, it's hard to create truly immutable classes. I ended up with this pattern:

  class Foo {
    #props
    
    constructor(props) {
      this.#props = Map(props)
    }

    get someField() {
      return this.#props.get('someField')
    }

    withSomeField(value) {
      return new Foo(this.#props.set('someField', value))
    }
  }

It works, but it's annoying. Then you have, as you say, all the coercion/conversions between Immutable and plain JS values.

TypeScript would help, but I think I'm going to look into Reason, too. I think I heard that it supports interoperating with ordinary JS. The problem with TS, last I tried it, was that while it supports JS, there are subtleties (like the lack of support for default imports) that mean it's not fully backwards compatible. You can't just run a JS codebase with the TS compiler and expect it to work, as I understand it.

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