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Excellent question. Turns out there is: http://elm-lang.org

Is a Haskell inspired programming language that makes developing front end a delight.

It helps to build Reliable front ends. Watch this conference to get a sense of what Elm does. Making the Backend Team Jelous[1]

Plus the Elm architecture makes everything orderly and easy to understand.

Quite a change from the mess of react components and Angular rewrites.

[1] https://youtu.be/FV0DXNB94NE

⬐ martijn_himself

This looks great, and thanks for providing the links. Is Elm production ready? Have you used it to build any apps?

⬐ lsjroberts

NoRedInk use it in production and are quite big advocates (having hired the BDFL) - http://tech.noredink.com/

⬐ lisardo

I talk about my experience. I deployed Elm to production in several projects for the biggest group fitness company in the US.

It's incredible. Compiler errors are incredible. No undefined bullshit. It's purely functional, so the code you need to understand at the same time is always gonna be inside 20 lines. And you can use it with javascript if you want too.

You will learn a lot using a pure functional programming language. Programming is about transforming data, so even if I go back to any OO language I learned that state can cause several problems.

⬐ martijn_himself

That sounds great. Did you have to convince anyone to adopt Elm or were you free to pick your language of choice? Using a pure functional language appeals to me as well.

⬐ citrusx

Obligatory counterpoint: http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/elm-is-wrong

I gave a talk going through this very conundrum. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV0DXNB94NE

I'm pretty keen to play with Elm, but it gives me some pause that an app like this (or the demo at https://github.com/evancz/start-app) results in... 11k lines of Javascript. Nevertheless, these talks got me bulled up on Elm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV0DXNB94NE (Richard Feldman, collegially, on React -> Elm)</a> / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYk8CKH7OhE (Evan Czaplicki on the motivation for Elm)

⬐ michaelsbradley

That's because the Elm compiler doesn't yet do much in the way of "dead code elimination" (DCE).

However, that will change in a future release of Elm, once Joey Eremondi's work has been fully integrated. My understanding is that integration is not slated for the 0.16 release (imminent) but will likely be part of the 0.17 release.

See: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/elm-dev/dead$20co...

⬐ hellofunk

Are they planning to leverage the Google Closure compiler the way Clojurescript does? Un-optimized Clojurescript is also huge until it runs through Closure compilation.

⬐ hellofunk

I should have read that thread first; it appears the answer to my question is "yes".

⬐ michaelsbradley

No, I believe the DCE implementation (still in the works) is specific to the Elm compiler, as opposed to an implementation which organizes the source in such a way as to leverage Google's Closure compiler.

Yeah, Richard Feldman's Strange Loop talk[1] touched upon Tasks and they do indeed look exactly like what I'm looking for.

Elm does look very nice. Not sure if I'd get the team on board with that kind of change ;)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV0DXNB94NE

⬐ thomasweiser

Nice talk, very motivating!

⬐ atrilumen

I felt a great disturbance in the Internet, as if hundreds of minds suddenly cried out for immutable data and stateless functions...