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by noahmarc 4586 days ago
Thanks for joining the discussion. Just want to say I'm working through the the videos for your coursera course (https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun) and, in addition to being a great introduction to Scala, it's changing how I approach other functional languages like JavaScript and R
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At most JavaScript is an imperative language with functional flavour
Try LiveScript: http://livescript.net/

JS semantics are those of a functional-oop language. It lacks a few standard functions (LiveScript has prelude-ls) and a ton of syntactic support for things. Once these are in place, you can write the code which looks and feels like Ocaml.

For example, moment.js function is `moment(dateString, formatString)`. In LiveScript I used it as:

     parseDate = (flip moment) "DD/MM/YYYY"
Now tell me that this doesn't look like functional code :)

(The only really lacking feature in JS is of course TCO, but then Clojure, so yeah, let's just trampoline everything.)