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Comment by rashkov | Hacker News Reader

I lucked into a job writing ReasonML (soon to be ReScript) on a React codebase some time late last year, and I've got to say that so far it has been a career highlight for this engineer. Not only did it scratch my itch for functional programming, but I also got to use one of the best type systems around as well, given how this project lives on top of the OCaml compiler.

That said, there were definitely some rough spots along the way, but I'm hopeful that this re-branding and unification of the infrastructure is a step in the right direction.

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The lack of documentation is the main issue that I had with it.

I haven't looked at Reason in awhile, but since its just sugar on top of OCaml, most OCaml docs/stackoverflow questions should help.

It gets tougher when you want to use ReasonReact

I definitely had the same positive experience with using OCaml/Reason at my job as well. There's so much power in being able to accurately represent the data model in the type system.

Yep! This talk captures it pretty darn well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up7LcbGZFuo

Besides that, the compiler becomes a partner in coding. - Refactoring things is no longer something I avoid, because the compiler will point out any unexpected places that interact with a given piece of code. - I can code for an hour without loading the app, and be reasonably certain that the code I'm writing will be more or less be correct. Overall, I feel like the compiler does the double-checking and second-guessing that I was always doing in the back of my head, which gives some peace of mind and frees me up to focus on the actual task.

Yeah! I'll code for days without running the app. In OCaml, it's as you say, mostly correct when I actually get around to running it. With PHP/JS, I still have a lot of work ahead of me. With OCaml I feel like I'm thinking much more about the problem and less about the language I'm using.

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