homepage/_posts/2017-07-02-purescript-the-first-look.md

ID	post_title	author	post_excerpt	layout	published	post_date
156	PureScript: The First Look	dreat		post	true	2017-07-02 22:13:20

After ElixirConfEu I decided to try PureScript. Partly for yet another frontend try, party because it looked interesting and partly because I wanted a little break with something way different and new.

I read a bit of this awesome book and did some of the exercises. Here are some first thoughts:

The bad:

• Install npm, to install bower, to install dependencies. I get it, it's JS. It's frontend. It's too young to have its own package manager and it's even better that it uses a common tool. But come one, you can do it better than this. Especially if apparently you can compile to C/Erlang/someothers - not only JS.
• Haskell-like docs. It's not the worst, but it's really not newbie friendly.

The good:

• Types! This is the most awesome thing, really. You specify what type goes in, what goes out. It's marvelous, especially for someone with a strong C# background.
• Quite obvious, FP approach
• Book (mentioned earlier) is a great learning resource. It's free and written by PS creator
• I know that it's not something crucial, but I really like the syntax
• How easy is to start, VSCode tools are great, you can google stuff and get some answers already
• The community seems small but nice
• Error messages are really, really helpful!

As you can see, there are way more "goods" than "bads". Should you try it? Definitely? Should you use it in your pet project? Sure! Should you use it in production? It depends ;) After going with dotnet core RC1 in production I'd say "hell yeah" but this requires the team that wants (not "can"; want!) to handle it, so my answer here is "it depends". Nevertheless, I'm hyped and will do something more with it, but the break is over and I'm heading back to Beam world now.