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Why do all new languages aimed at the browser seem to be "strongly typed, functional". I have no objection whatsoever, but we've seen Elm, Purescript and now th

Why do all new languages aimed at the browser seem to be "strongly typed, functional". I have no objection whatsoever, but we've seen Elm, Purescript and now this. Or is my perception skewed by the "HN Echo Chamber"?

Latty 8y ago
I think it's just that JS caters to those features the least, so that's where you see new languages from people that want them.
bad_user 8y ago
"Strong typing" as a term has actually been muddied and doesn't mean much nowadays other than "not C", being re-purposed for marketing reasons. Irregardless of the language, you don't want your language to be weakly typed, although in fact you can say that about most dynamically typed languages. Leaving the marketing efforts aside, what people want to express is "statically typed". A static type system can prove a lot of things about your program. Traditionally you could rely on (good) static type system to prove that your program is memory safe, or that it has as few runtime errors as possible, preferably zero. N.B. don't fall into the trap of saying that a language like C is statically typed. When you can pass void pointers around and cast that to anything, that's in fact not static typing. Type theory has a lot to do with math logic actually, the two being highly interchangeable. Statically typed compilers can prove various properties about your program, freeing the developer from writing certain classes of tests, plus it makes refactoring easier. Refactoring, correctness, these are things people have always struggled with in JavaScript, especially due to JavaScript's nature. Quick, can you tell me the answer to "Math.min() < Math.max()" in JavaScript? You know it's a trick question, given this is JavaScript, don't you ;-) --- Other than ClojureScript, I don't know of any other dynamic language targeting JavaScript engines and that's interesting. None. And ClojureScript is only interesting because it is a LISP and because it has sane conventions and defaults. Languages providing superficial syntactic sugar, such as CoffeeScript, have been a really bad idea and I'm glad that we've moved on. Therefore the innovation that happens tends to happen in statically typed languages, because there's a lot there left to explore and because such languages tend to bring value. That said I always wonder what new languages bring to the table versus already available alternatives like PureScript, Scala.js, ClojureScript, Elm, etc. And from the TFA I don't understand what those advantages are.
always_good 8y ago
Probably because people already have their pick of those languages on the server but not on the browser client where it's even more important to get things right from a UX standpoint. Static-typing, immutable datastructures, FP... these are things that even the Javascript ecosystem has been moving towards with React, Typescript, Redux, and more. If you're making a language for the browser, you can offer a lot of value by rolling these into a single tool. For example, it may be much simpler for you to use Elm than to approximate Elm with your own menagerie of JS tools.

Latty 8y ago

I think it's just that JS caters to those features the least, so that's where you see new languages from people that want them.

bad_user 8y ago

"Strong typing" as a term has actually been muddied and doesn't mean much nowadays other than "not C", being re-purposed for marketing reasons. Irregardless of the language, you don't want your language to be weakly typed, although in fact you can say that about most dynamically typed languages. Leaving the marketing efforts aside, what people want to express is "statically typed". A static type system can prove a lot of things about your program. Traditionally you could rely on (good) static type system to prove that your program is memory safe, or that it has as few runtime errors as possible, preferably zero. N.B. don't fall into the trap of saying that a language like C is statically typed. When you can pass void pointers around and cast that to anything, that's in fact not static typing. Type theory has a lot to do with math logic actually, the two being highly interchangeable. Statically typed compilers can prove various properties about your program, freeing the developer from writing certain classes of tests, plus it makes refactoring easier. Refactoring, correctness, these are things people have always struggled with in JavaScript, especially due to JavaScript's nature. Quick, can you tell me the answer to "Math.min() < Math.max()" in JavaScript? You know it's a trick question, given this is JavaScript, don't you ;-) --- Other than ClojureScript, I don't know of any other dynamic language targeting JavaScript engines and that's interesting. None. And ClojureScript is only interesting because it is a LISP and because it has sane conventions and defaults. Languages providing superficial syntactic sugar, such as CoffeeScript, have been a really bad idea and I'm glad that we've moved on. Therefore the innovation that happens tends to happen in statically typed languages, because there's a lot there left to explore and because such languages tend to bring value. That said I always wonder what new languages bring to the table versus already available alternatives like PureScript, Scala.js, ClojureScript, Elm, etc. And from the TFA I don't understand what those advantages are.

always_good 8y ago

Probably because people already have their pick of those languages on the server but not on the browser client where it's even more important to get things right from a UX standpoint. Static-typing, immutable datastructures, FP... these are things that even the Javascript ecosystem has been moving towards with React, Typescript, Redux, and more. If you're making a language for the browser, you can offer a lot of value by rolling these into a single tool. For example, it may be much simpler for you to use Elm than to approximate Elm with your own menagerie of JS tools.