What are the best portable functional programming languages?

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Mar 21, 2021

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4 Options Considered

Best portable functional programming languages	Price	Price	Current stable version
-- ClojureScript	Open Source	Open Source	1.9
-- Elm	-	Open Source	0.19
-- PureScript	-	-	-
-- Shen	-	-	-

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score 2 · Answer 1

ClojureScript

Top Pro

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server. See More

Top Con

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language. See More

Specs

Price:Open Source

Current stable version:1.9

Site:https://clojurescript.org/

GZipped size:32 kB

Top Pro

Can be used with React out of the box

Top Pro

The Spec core library

From the creator of Clojure: Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure. Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation. See More

Top Pro

Excellent build tools

Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment. See More

Top Pro

Simple syntax

Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries. See More

Top Pro

Excellent tools for web development

ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process. See More

Top Pro

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time. See More

Top Pro

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece). See More

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score 2 · Answer 2

Elm

Top Pro

Static module system

Elm uses easy to use modules. Use: import List import List as L import List exposing (..) import List exposing ( map, foldl ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(..) ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(Just) ) Creation: module MyModule exposing (foo, bar) See More

Top Con

Poor Windows support

Few if any of Elm's core contributors are Windows users and breaking bugs are sometimes left for weeks or months. See More

Specs

Price:Open Source

Current stable version:0.19

Site:http://elm-lang.org/

GZipped size:23.2 kB

See All Specs

Top Pro

Not quite Haskell semantics

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible. See More

Top Con

Not database-friendly

It is lots of work to make a server or database your "one source of truth", as Elm makes you write endless JSON parse boilerplate to talk to the server. See More

Top Pro

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Elm is gaining popularity, somewhat faster than many of the other solutions here. This translates to more code examples, more documentation, and more libraries. See More

Top Pro

Growing community

Top Pro

Designed around high-level front-end development

As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web. See More

Top Pro

Inferred static typing

ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do. See More

Top Pro

No run-time exceptions

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests. See More

Top Pro

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable. See More

Top Pro

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

Build animations, games, and interactions with an incredibly small amount of terse, readable code. See More

Top Pro

Good tooling

All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type. See More

Top Pro

Missing Syntactic sugar

Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what. See More

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score 1 · Answer 3

PureScript

Top Pro

FFI

FFI system is quite good and easy to use. You can import functions curried or not curried. Records and arrays use native JS objects and arrays. See More

Top Con

Lots of dependencies needed to get started

Purescript is written in Haskell, but meant to be used with Node.js. As a result, to get started , users must install ghc, cabal, node.js, grunt, and bower. Purescript also has its own compiler, and different semantics form Haskell, and so even after installing, there's still some overhead to getting productive with Purescript. See More

Top Pro

Pure functional language

You cannot have side effects, unless a function is explicitly defined as so. See More

Top Pro

Modules can be compiled to CommonJS

Modules compiled to CommonJS can be included with 'require', making it incredibly simple to call Purescript code from Javascript. See More

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score 1 · Answer 4

Shen

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What are the best portable functional programming languages?

4 Options Considered

ClojureScript

My Recommendation for ClojureScript

My Recommendation for ClojureScript

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Can be used with React out of the box

The Spec core library

Excellent build tools

Simple syntax

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Excellent tools for web development

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Elm

My Recommendation for Elm

My Recommendation for Elm

Static module system

Poor Windows support

Not quite Haskell semantics

Not database-friendly

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Good documentation

Growing community

Designed around high-level front-end development

Inferred static typing

No run-time exceptions

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

Good tooling

Missing Syntactic sugar

PureScript

My Recommendation for PureScript

My Recommendation for PureScript

FFI

Lots of dependencies needed to get started

Pure functional language

Modules can be compiled to CommonJS

Shen

My Recommendation for Shen

My Recommendation for Shen

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