Hacker News Reader

Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

Wow, hadn't kept up with purescript at all. It can now compile to JS, Go and C++11 and supports full interop in all 3 cases! That's pretty damn cool.

How's the language itself? I had heard it was a Haskell clone, is that still mostly true? If not, where does it differ and differentiate itself?

View on HN

It compiles to Erlang too. The language itself is extremely similar to Haskell but with some refinements around some of the legacy baggage Haskell suffers from (string handling for example). Some differentiators include: strict evaluation by default, handling of record types, an extremely modular package policy (nothing is imported by default), and a lack of some things that can potentially make Haskell esoteric at times (template Haskell for example). The community is small but dedicated. Documentation can be very minimal in a lot of cases, so it’s not a beginner friendly language, but once you are up and running, it’s a pretty awesome experience overall.

Also the dev tooling isn't an afterthought and the IDE experience is top notch. (This isn't very different from Haskell nowadays with HIE).

In my experience attempting to learn it you have to be pretty familiar with Haskell since as you mention a lot of stuff isn't well documented outside of types and small blurbs.

It's been a year since I tried and I'm sure a ton has changed since then but I don't expect this to be different for a while. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as all new languages have this problem and learning Haskell is very valuable experience for any programmer - just not an easy one.

Basically PureScript isn't something you can jump into like Elm or Typescript or w/e, while being an experienced programmer who knows JS or non-Haskell-y languages, but it's future is very bright if it gets mainstream adoption IMO and I'm following it closely.

And don't forget first class records with row polymorphism!

Interested readers might want to Try PureScript[0] for a quick demonstration.

[0]: http://try.purescript.org

Hum, that sounds pretty neat actually. How does it manage purity without lazyness?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com