A few questions:
- Did you use anything else than Haskell? If so what made you switch to Haskell?
- How do you handle JS? Just write JS? TS? Haskell compiled to JS?
- Are there any challenges specific to Haskell?
- Did you use anything else than Haskell? If so what made you switch to Haskell?
- How do you handle JS? Just write JS? TS? Haskell compiled to JS?
- Are there any challenges specific to Haskell?
- I try to avoid JS. I do progressive enhancement with vanilla JS, and avoid JS webapps unless absolutely necessary. If I need to write a JS webapp, I use a purely functional approach. I found that when writing React, using frameworks, using TypeScript or PureScript, I lost so much time and effort managing my build step and fighting with APIs and package churn. I use preact with the htm library, vanilla JS, and most importantly no build step and no npm. I don’t use a framework. I use a purely functional approach inspired from Haskell/Elm. I have an update function which returns a new state and effects from the current state and event, and a dispatch function which is attached to onevent props. The dispatch function calls the update function, renders, and runs effects. These few functions are 20 lines of code.
- No challenges specific to Haskell so far. Of course I had to learn the ecosystem when I started, which packages to use, language and tooling gotchas, etc. but that is the case for any language.
Here's an example of a working app using my approach I described above: https://jsbin.com/putonutica/edit?js,output
The two functions, render and dispatch, are essentially the only code I share across the projects. That's the whole "framework". It's 19 lines of code. All it requires is a link to Preact, which is 14K. Oh, and I just keep everything in one big file. Simple, but I've built multiple complex single-page JS apps with this approach.
I'm sure someone will tell me I'm doing it all wrong, and I need to use Next.js with webpack, a giant stack of npm packages, code-splitting and bundling, and whatever craziness front-end developers are doing today.