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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

You can write JavaScript via Typescript, and you now have one of the best and most popular languages there is (including sum types). There are still a lot of warts, but it’s actually a really nice language IMO.

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No good backend frameworks comparable to Rails/Laravel/Django in JavaScript though (and I say this as someone who works with JS backends in my day job).

There is AdonisJS, a JS framework inspired by Laravel. I don't know if it has 1:1 feature comparison with Laravel, but for someone who uses Laravel daily like me, it seems nice.

I like TypeScript as a language to write, but find the compilation process to be almost impossible to tolerate. Every time I return to an old project and try to compile it again, something is broken: from a dependency deciding to change their own compilation process for one incompatible with mine, to some deep dependency of my own compilation process changing which conflicts with some other part of my process. I spend more time on my project's compilation process than the project itself: something that is only true of TypeScript.

Things are improving as more and more "batteries included" projects are launched, and it's better today than it was a year ago, so I'm happy about the positive change and I am optimistic about the future, but right now I can't begin to imagine labelling TypeScript as even close to being one of the "best" languages, because delivering software with it is a nightmare. TypeScript is great to write but hell to turn into JavaScript.

Have you seen ReScript and/or ReasonML? They are much nicer IHMO, but, yes, not as popular.

Typescript hits that sweet spot of popularity/portability/type-safety, and although ReasonML is superior in nearly any technical criteria imaginable, I still reach to TS when I'm starting new.

I've played with them quite a bit from the first time they were mentioned on HN. I really like OCaml. But the tooling and ergonomics are heavily in TypeScript's favor at this point, and at least for me, that makes a bit difference in day-to-day work. Anyway, my favorite of that variety of languages is PureScript. It's almost perfect.

I wholly agree about PureScript. Elm's also nice. I like the fact that it is a little dumb down (same could be said for early Java and Go), it creates code everyone can read. While it is still very Haskelly in day-to-day practice. In fact I'd say PureScript and Elm are stronger typed than Haskell (as e.g. `head` in Elm evals to a Maybe).

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