Add to ChromeWhen comparing Visual Basic vs PureScript, the Slant community recommends PureScript for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” PureScript is ranked 39th while Visual Basic is ranked 71st. The most important reason people chose PureScript is:
Has Typeclasses and RankNTypes
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Capable language
Compiling to the same intermediate language as C# and compiling against the same .NET libraries, the differences between C# and VB are largely syntactic. Most VB features even have a 1:1 correspondence with C#.
Pro Huge community
Being Microsoft's introductory language, visual basic has a strong and large community.
Pro English-like syntax
Pro Flexible, won't get in the way of a beginner
A beginner developer can worry about the code logic first, and then learn the language. Visual Basic lets you do basically anything if you really want, while still having the power to be a fully statically-typed and object oriented.
Pro Sibling to C#
If you don't want to start with C# because of its high learning floor, you can start with VB. It is dead easy to switch between the two.
Pro Very simple and efficient language (in terms of number of lines of code)
Pro Easy to deal with Win32API
Using platform invoke, it's very easy to use the win32 api in vb.net. Neat and clean syntax. Not a mess like c# (meaning those "{}"s).
Pro Higher kinded types
Has Typeclasses and RankNTypes
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 efficient code.
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 Has row polymorphism and extensible effects
Pro Type safety
Compiling should be your first unit test. A tight type system (static and hopefully strong) will catch many logic errors that are often difficult to spot through debugging. In languages like PureScript, if it compiles, it often runs properly.
Pro Pure functional language
You cannot have side effects, unless a function is explicitly defined as so.
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.
Pro Thorough documentation
The Purescript website has fairly thorough documentation for all of the language's features, and the Purescript blog contains several examples of practical usage.
Pro Awesome web frameworks
Thermite (React)
Halogen (VDOM, similar to ELM)
And hit these up with Signals, Isolated/(Managed?) Components, powerful functions and FFI
Cons
Con Bad reputation
Being a visual basic programmer, you're unlikely to be taken seriously by other programmers. According to the 2015 Stack Overflow survey, it was voted the second most dreaded language among developers.
Con Almost as bad as Python, but less used.
Con Tends to get clunky due to prebuilt assets
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.
Con Lack of good IDE/tooling support
Con Restrictive FFI
Functions exported are all curried, and must be called as such from Javascript. The FFI syntax for importing Javascript functions, while slightly simpler and more readable than UHC/Fay's, means that calls to methods on objects must be wrapped to pass the object explicitly as a parameter.
Con Documentation not updated
Con Ecosystem not stable
Con Slow compilation
On large project, for example Halogen
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