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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,...
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.
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.
Con Adds an additional layer of abstraction
Some users claim that Elm adds an additional layer of abstraction, meaning that it is one more hurdle between the brain and the product.
Pro Immutable values
The immutable values make it perfect for working with concurrency.
Pro Type inference
Scala offers type inference, which, while giving the same safety as Java's type system, allows programmers to focus on the code itself, rather than on updating type annotations.
Con Can be intimidating for beginners
Scala is an industrial language. It brings functional programming to the JVM, but not with a "start small and grow the language" perspective, but rather a very powerful language for professional programmers.
Pro Easier transition from other paradigms
Since F# is not a purely functional language, it lends itself to being more easily picked up by programmers that have experience with other paradigms.
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.
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.
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 compar...
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.
Pro High performance FFI code
The Eff monad, which is used for FFI code, optimizes out calls to bind, and supports tail call optimization, resulting in clean, efficient Javascript. The psc compiler also specifically recognizes the ST monad, and transforms scoped variables into mutable Javascript variables, for even more efficie...
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 g...
Pro Terse
Haskell is a very terse language, particularly due to its type inference. This means there's nothing to distract from the intent of the code, making it very readable. This is in sharp contrast to languages like Java, where skimming code requires learning which details can be ignored. Haskell...
Pro Very few language constructs
The base language relies primarily on function application, with a very small amount of special-case syntax. Once you know the rules for function application, you know most of the language.
Con Steep learning curve
Haskell lends itself well to powerful abstractions - the result is that even basic, commonly used libraries, while easy to use, are implemened using a vocabularly that requires a lot of backround in abstract mathematics to understand. Even a concept as simple as "combine A and B" is ofte...
Con Delayed Results
Haskell's static typing, while helpful when building a project, can be positively frustrating for beginners. Quick feedback for errors means delaying the dopamine hit of code actually running. While in some languages, a beginner's first experience may be their code printing "Hello Worl...
Pro Generates small, reasonably performant code
Haste generates a small amount of JavaScript which usually performs well.
Pro Client and Server as the same application
Haste was designed to allow both the client and server to be written as parts of the same, type-safe application. This is in stark contrast to most other options, where the client and server are considered two separate entities, resulting in extra manual validation code and more chances for type er...
Con Lacks some minor Haskell functionality
Lacks support for Template Haskell for example.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Pro Supports multi paradigm development
Ocaml is a very strong functional programming language but also supports some object oriented programmig technics
Con Not very strong support for concurret / parallel development for the backend
This is in the moment meaningless for web frontend development. However it has relevance for the server backend development where concurrency is an advantage. Backends can definately be developed in Ocaml but lack of good concurrency support is a Con compared to other canguages. And as it is often...
Con Some small strange quirks in the syntax
It uses +. instead of + for floating point additions (and -. *. /. etc), which is easy to get used to, but it's not quite clear what it's supposed to be good for.
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