Here’s the Deal

Ruby (via Opal) vs Idris

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When comparing Ruby (via Opal) vs Idris, the Slant community recommends Ruby (via Opal) for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Ruby (via Opal) is ranked 16th while Idris is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Ruby (via Opal) is:

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"] for ss in 0...presidents.length print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n"; end

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript?

Pros

Pro
Elegant syntax

presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
    print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end

Pro
Popular

Ruby is one of the most popular languages for developing web sites. As a result, there's an abundant amount of documentation, sample code, and libraries available for learning the language and getting your project up and running. The most popular features are just 'gem install' away.

Pro
Full dependent types

Idris not only has support for type classes, but is a fully dependently typed language, giving you the full power to statically verify your code.

Pro
Domain driven design and type driven development

Because of full dependent types in Idris, the programmer can focus more on modelling the domain with types and waste less time fixing common bugs that the type checker will catch. Dependent types help apply type driven development and a lot of code auto generation, making the compiler and type checker an ally in developing working software instead of just getting in the way.

Cons

Con
Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class.

In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can't tell what kind of "helper" functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times.

Con
Not widely used

Con
Weaker type inference

As type inference is undecidable for dependently-typed languages, Idris cannot offer the full type inference that Haskell supports, and so more type annotations will be needed.

Con
Different semantics from Haskell

Idris, while similar to Haskell, has strict semantics, which may cause some confusion if your backend is done in Haskell. If using Idris, it would make sense to do the backend in Idris as well, if not for the fact that Idris currently has fewer libraries available for web development than Haskell.