A Tutorial Introduction to Gleam -- Part 1

April 17, 2022 in Programming, Languages, Gleam

Introduction Gleam is a newish programming language that I recently stumbled upon. It is so little-known that there aren’t really any tutorials available on it (even on the official documentation), so I decided to write my own. Gleam transpiles to Javascript and Erlang. I’ll be focusing my attention on the Erlang side of things, as it is more mature. And to be honest, I don’t feel any reason to replace Rescript, my go-to transpires-to-Javascript language.

Some Esoteric Languages

April 14, 2022 in Programming, Languages

Introduction I was basically flat with an illness (yes, that one) on my back for two weeks in March. I could do little more than read articles on my tablet, and for reasons I cannot explain, I began chainsmoking the documentation for as many little-known languages as I could find. I honestly don’t know why. In the fog of illness, it just seemled a fun thing to do. I’m weird.

Rescript, Reason, Typescript, OCAML, Javascript, Help Me Choose!

December 18, 2021 in Programming, Rescript

Introduction I’ve been writing plenty about Rescript this year, although I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus to focus on developing a couple (Rescript) open source libraries. I wanted to get back into blogging to answer one of the most confusing questions in the Rescript community: What is ReasonML and how does it relate to Rescript? However, it has grown into something quite a bit bigger. Instead, we’ll be talking about the relationships between a collection of several interrelated languages, and I’ll give my opinion on which you should use.

Introducing rescript-dexie

October 13, 2021 in Programming, Rescript

As hinted in some of my recent articles on Rescript, I’ve been working on bindings to the wonderful Dexie interface to IndexedDB. It’s finally ready to announce to the world (in a fairly beta format)! rescript-dexie depends on a recent version of Rescript and the rescript-promise library. It’s still fairly beta and I haven’t covered all the features Dexie packs in yet, but the basics are working well. It feels intuitive and gives the right mix of sound type safety and easy call sites.

Fast, Bare, Rescript React

September 30, 2021 in Programming, Learning, Rescript

Introduction (Note: There is a more recent version of this article) Most of my Rescript series so far has been about combining Rescript with React using create-react-app. Now that I understand Rescript better, I’m not so sure create-react-app is a good fit for it. Mostly because it’s slow. Rescript compiles JSX natively, so we shouldn’t need slow and hard-to-configure webpack. Most of create-react-app is about hiding the configuration of webpack from the end-user.

Let's Talk About Functors In Rescript

September 18, 2021 in Programming, Learning, Rescript

Introduction For basic syntax, functional programming does not feel that different from other paradigms. Sure, data and behaviour are separate, so you don’t have classes or objects or inheritance, but it feels relatively the same. This is especially true in Rescript, with the pipe-first syntax almost looking like a method lookup (comparable to the self object in Python). But if you go deeply into a study of functional languages, you start encountering bizarre words such as “monad” and “functor”.

Fun With Rescript Polymorphic Variants

September 6, 2021 in Programming, Learning, Rescript

Introduction Polymorphic variants in Rescript are strange beasts. They aren’t generally that useful in pure Rescript programming, but are frequently necessary in binding to Javascript. Polymorphic variants are extremely flexible (too flexible), but one of the most common uses is to represent a list of constant strings that a JS binding can accept. For example, the ubiquitous on function used for event handlers typically takes a string as its first parameter, as in on("click".