Suggestion for Making it easier for JS/TS to onboard to Rescript + my own experience

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I am happy with Rescript. Thanks. The only regret I have is that I didn’t know about it earlier. I know I should have but I didn’t.:slight_smile:

But getting into Rescript is kind of hard, if you don’t know at least OCaml, Haskell, F#, or another functional programming language. The documentation is great if you have that background. If you don’t… not so much:(. Obviously, it’s not the job of the Rescript community or the Rescript team to teach people functional programming. I get that.

I am a fanatic. I have time and I don’t give up easily. But I can imagine a lot of JS/TS developers with jobs and a life, won’t have so much patience and time.

I want the community to grow so I have a small suggestion.

  • Explain clearly that you need to learn functional programming with either OCaml, Haskell, F#, … .

There are no good books for ReasonML. The few that are available are really bad. So I would suggest OCaml.

Otherwise, we’ll lose people just because they are still stuck in imperative hell, and will try to apply imperative thinking to Rescript, which doesn’t work. Believe me, people actually do that. I did. Once you get into OCaml, getting into Rescript is easy.

When I saw a few idiots on Medium posting ignorant information about Rescript, I decided to write my experience. Feel free to retweet, and share, … so more people get into Rescript. Or, even better, write your own experience.

A Journey from JavaScript and TypeScript, to Rescript/React, via Elm, OCaml & Haskell.

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The point is, while ReScript has of course its heritage from an (impure ) functional language, I would not call it functional anymore. Yes, it still falls on the functional side of the spectrum, but I would not advertise it as functional, because that draws in a lot of the functional advocates who then will ask why ReScript has no monadic let or the like.

In fact that is also what the ReScript team advocates for.

If you happen to onboard JS/TS-Developers to ReScript, please share your findings here so that documentation can get better.

Sidenote: I think we need a great (full-stack?) tutorial like the amazing Rails tutorial, which is very beginner-friendly. It does not need to be that extreme, ReScript still won’t probably be the first language people learn, but JS is pretty good for that. That probably would need some funding.

Small, but a good start nonetheless, is the protoship tutorial.

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My Rescript series was meant to fill that need, although it presupposes a lot of js knowledge. I’ve been thinking of ways to simplify it for more raw beginners, but I haven’t got a lot of time right now.

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