Writing Typescript like OCaml or Haskell. A fun(ctional) experiment.

For quite some time, I have this itch to build a complete web app in Typescript with Strict Functional Programming Paradigm. Recently, I stumbled upon this amazing library called Effect. It finally gave me hope that this is actually possible. Decided to do it as a “Learning in Public” experiment. Let’s see how it goes :fingerscrossed:

What do I mean by “Strict” Functional Programming?

Devil is in the language features. We will tame it with constraints emphasised by FP.

• No Statements(if/else, for, while, switch etc.,) allowed.
• No direct assignments/mutations allowed.
• No direct use of null or undefined allowed.
• No Try/Catch allowed.
• No direct construction of complex types like Objects and arrays as they are mutable by default.
• No Illegal states should be representable.

I will expand each one of the above constraints and why I chose them, in dedicated blog posts later.

How am I going to do this experiment?

Pick up a simple idea. Spend at-least 5 hours a week building the idea. Focus on building the systems and processes to write strictly functional full-stack code with typescript.

Live Stream the whole process and open source all the code. Share the progress and interesting ideas that comes out of this experiment. Complete and launch the product in product hunt.

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