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by PeCaN 3617 days ago
Firstly, poor analogy—English is a much superior language to Esperanto in terms information density over seconds per syllable in addition to being more expressive (it's easier to talk about a wide variety of topics and abstractions). Possibly more importantly than that, it takes a lot of people to make a spoken language useful for doing business but far far fewer for a computer language.

> instead of bemoaning the entirely rational decisions made by millions of junior and senior developers

I think people are bemoaning the stupid shit and not the entirely rational decisions. JS makes the former a bit easy.

> Python community was dissatisfied with JS and created Coffeescript

Nitpicking, but the first CoffeeScript compiler was written in Ruby and the language was largely inspired by Ruby.

> the Java community got class syntax added to ES6

Huh that's a new one

pretty sure that's not just the Java community, given that JS developers have been independently inventing class libraries (starting with Prototype, if not earlier) for ages.

> I'm sure Haskell has plenty of really cool things to bring to the table, but I've never heard of any of them

Underscore, lazy.js, other popular JavaScript libraries have some Haskellisms; LiveScript is a fork of CoffeeScript that used to be moderately popular and very Haskelly; React takes a lot of ideas from Haskell; immutable.js is quite Haskellian….

I think you're just not looking.

> all the Haskell community wants do is talk about how JavaScript sucks

You can drive a go cart on the highway, and you can keep modding your go cart, but at some point you might want to not be driving a fucking go cart on the highway.

1 comments

Ramda is arguably the most Haskelly JS library.
I am loving Ramda. I started integrating it for my React project, and I love how my code started collapsing.