What are the best Functional languages to learn for web-frontend development?

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score 51 · Accepted Answer

Elm

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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 Con

Splitting code in smaller modules can be hard

While organising code in a single module is extremely straightforward, when your update functions seep in, new modules building functionality becomes complicated. See More

VigorousBulucChabtan's Experience

The feeling you get when it compiles and works is priceless. You can refactor like a superhuman. It has changed how I program in every language. See More

Specs

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

Current stable version:0.19

Price:Open Source

GZipped size:23.2 kB

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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 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

Jared M. Smith's Experience

Elm helps me enjoy programming again while creating safe, fast web apps. It's easier to work with a team in Elm where refactoring is easy and fast than in JavaScript where refactoring is scary without near-complete code testing coverage. See More

Top Pro

Very good way to report compilation errors

Error reporting in Elm is really awesome. It pinpoints exact location in file and also provides hints on what might have gone wrong. See More

Top 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. See More

LuckyBayamanaco's Experience

Enjoy front-end development again by removing JavaScript fatigue, improving product quality, and making business logic easier to implement. See More

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 Con

Cannot use third party libraries

Elm does not have a Foreign Function Interface (FFI), so you can't really use third party libraries with Elm. See More

Top Pro

No run time errors

It's statically typed with type inference so even if you don't write type signatures it won't compile if you try to do something that's impossible (ie try to use an integer as a string). See More

Top Con

No server support

Top Pro

The Elm Architecture

Redux was born as something heavily inspired by the Elm mandated pattern you build apps with. 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

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

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

Top Pro

Growing community

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

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

Batteries included

The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in. See More

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 Pro

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

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

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The Best 1 of 10 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Elm

My Recommendation for Elm

Good documentation

Splitting code in smaller modules can be hard

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

Poor Windows support

Very good way to report compilation errors

Adds an additional layer of abstraction

Designed around high-level front-end development

Cannot use third party libraries

No run time errors

No server support

The Elm Architecture

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

Inferred static typing

Good tooling

Missing Syntactic sugar

Growing community

No run-time exceptions

Batteries included

Not quite Haskell semantics

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

9 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for ClojureScript

My Recommendation for ClojureScript

Live interactive programming with figwheel

Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp

Share application logic between browser and Clojure server

Simple syntax

Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations

Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries

Can be used with React out of the box

The Spec core library

Excellent build tools

Excellent tools for web development

My Recommendation for Reason ML

My Recommendation for Reason ML

Uses established compiler technology from Ocaml with a tweaked syntax that leans more towards Javascript

Uses the excellent Bucklescript Ocaml to Javascript transpiler

Aims to make the transition from Javascript easier

My Recommendation for Scala

My Recommendation for Scala

Immutable values

Can be intimidating for beginners

Type inference

JavaScript runtime seems immature

Multiparadigm

Compiles to JavaScript

Compiles to JVM bytecode

My Recommendation for Purescript

My Recommendation for Purescript

Lots of dependencies needed to get started

High performance FFI code

Slow compilation

Pure functional language

Type safety

Has row polymorphism and extensible effects

Higher kinded types

Modules can be compiled to CommonJS

My Recommendation for F#

My Recommendation for F#

Easier transition from other paradigms

.NET's garbage collection is slow

Fable Javascript transpiler creates good readable javascript

Allows to use the same language for web-frontend and server backend

Concise syntax

Runs on the CLR

Natively supported by Visual Studio

Built-in REPL

My Recommendation for JavaScript

My Recommendation for JavaScript

Native support in browser

No syntactic or standard library support for value semantics

Powerful syntactic support for value oriented programming

First-class functions with lexical closures

Required for web development

My Recommendation for OCaml

My Recommendation for OCaml

Supports multi-paradigm development