Thoughts about marketing slogan for ReScript

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I am thinking more about marketing for ReScript these days.

What is the selling point of ReScript, where does it really shine, how is it different from typescript?

ReScript – a data oriented programming language optimized for JS platform

This is what comes into my mind.

There are many good parts from ReScript, e.g, soundly typed, great performance, fearless refactoring.

The essential points, in my opinion, are just two parts:

  • It has a very rich data description language for data modelling, ADTs, pattern match, polymorphic variants, and row polymorphism. All these parts combined together make ReScript really shines in data modelling.

  • Optimized for JS platform. What sets ReScript from other ML dialects is that the quality of the compiler is really good, and comes with a lightning fast build system, easy interop with JS ecosystem. Without such hard engineering, it would stay in the academics.

ReScript used to be marketed as a functional language, or JS with types. This is nice, but there are some problems with such marketing:

  • Functional language makes people think about Haskell or other academic languages. ReScript is a practical language, it is designed to make shipping easier, it has some reasonable abstractions, but it is not really for building fancy abstractions. So marketing ReScript as a functional language would make us targeted to a small niche audience which is probably not what we want.

  • JS with types. There are just too many here. It is hard to explain to an average programmer how typescript’s type system is different from ReScript, if it takes a while to explain, let’s just avoid it.

What do you think?

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@Hongbo Just a suggestion. Can we also include the word safe?
A safe, data oriented programming language optimized for JS platform. Safety from undefined or null errors, safety from type mismatches and importantly safety from “any”.

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I like your reasoning about how ReScript should sell itself.
That said, I think a slogan must be very short. If you take Vercel for example, their marketing slogan is just “Develop. Preview. Ship”. And that’s dope.

Your arguments are good and I am pretty sure this thread will lead to an awesome slogan.

Here is my take

Like JavaScript but data oriented and 100% type safe.

I read carefully your last point about ReScript vs TypeScript and what comes to my mind is that people know that TS isn’t fully type safe just because of “any”. Many times I read people complaining about this. We could use this at our advantage, so here is another idea.

Type Safe JavaScript, without “any”

I know this one sucks, it’s just to drop some ideas. Cumulating ideas, even weird ones, will lead to the best idea :slight_smile:

Another, too long for sure

Imagine JavaScript with good data structures & real type safety. Say hello to ReScript.

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Just for reference:

ReScript: Fast, Simple, Fully Typed JavaScript from the Future

TypeScript: Typed JavaScript at Any Scale

Flow: Flow is a static type checker for JavaScript developers

OCaml: OCaml is an industrial-strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles

Target audience

I understand our target audience is JS developers who have already discovered typing, i.e. developers currently using TypeScript or Flow?

IMO it would be a good idea to try to keep the concepts relevant to what JS devs are familiar with. For example, terms such “data oriented”, “safe” and even “soundly typed” are not part of an average JS dev vocabulary. They are all true, but may require some context to understand.

Suggestion

Based on some of the marketing slogans above, plus focusing on the JS developer rather than the JS language:

ReScript: Industrial strength type safety for JavaScript developers

Thanks for the initiative @Hongbo

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I’m new here so I still remember why I was attracted to rescript.

Headline:

ReScript - JavaScript ReImagined

“bullet points” (in descending order of importance)

  • simple and sound typing
  • uncomplicated
  • no bad parts
  • fast transpiling
  • easily use JS libraries

bullet points “simple and sound typing”, “uncomplicated”, and “fast transpiling” attack TS directly, “no bad parts” attacks JS (referencing the famous Crockford book), and “easily use JS libraries” mitigating concerns about library availability (although this personally concerns me, a lot more works needs to be done with more bindings)

What you don’t need to mention:

“fast run-time” - so maybe it outputs more efficient javascript code. nobody really cares and I’m sure there’s some blogger waiting to write a series of benchmarks to show you it doesn’t make much of a difference.

“functional” - only the functional weenies care about this and because they are functional weenies they already know its ‘functional’

“data modeling”: thought never even crossed my mind.

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Note safe has different meanings based on the context.

For example, Java claim it’s memory safe compared with C

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That said, I think a slogan must be very short. If you take Vercel for example, their marketing slogan is just “Develop. Preview. Ship”. And that’s dope.

I am not a native speaker. Here, my “slogan” means one line to describe the essentials of ReScript. Hopefully that one line may be attractive to people who don’t know programming too much, e.g, business people. “Data oriented” is a term coined by me

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Industrial strength type safety for JavaScript developers

The thing is that every language claims it is industrial strength.

This applies to safety& fast too, they are relative hard to measure.

  • For safety, even some language claims it is type safe, its type system probably has bugs (with a weak implementation)
  • For fast, I noticed someone even mention Rust is compiling fast, so this sounds a really vague word.

So I am thinking of coining a new word to capture people’s curiosity and keep them with solid implementation

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Just my 2 cents. When I come to reasonml from typescript selling point was that it’s a language with pipes that finally work.

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‘Data oriented’ is probably the best way to describe ReScript’s technical approach–it is starting to be used in general in that sense: Manning | Data-Oriented Programming

But, I’m not sure enough people are familiar with it to take away much information from this description. To your original question:

What is the selling point of ReScript, where does it really shine, how is it different from typescript?

For me there are three points: simple, fast, type-safe. All three are points of difference from TypeScript. For me, the current ReScript landing page slogan captures most of it. If we tweak it a bit:

Simple, fast, type-safe language for JavaScript platforms

Agreed that ‘safe’ has many possible meanings, but ‘type-safe’ has a very specific meaning in both industry and academia. And it captures a lot of the value proposition.

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This gets my vote :clap:

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“fast” in compile speed or run speed? Many people will think it means the later, which makes it deceptive, which I guess is normal for slogans.

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I would suggest to mention React in the slogan since it Rescript excels on React and lacks native support on other frameworks. So its not a generic JS replacement like Typescript

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ReScript is a general programming language, it is not just designed for React.

Actually I wish people use it more in other areas including server side.

lacks native support on other frameworks.

Wrapper for other frameworks is nice to have, eventually I think we should build some framework purely in ReScript. The thing that ReScript makes binding easier is a double edge sword, it drives people to use some existing stuff instead of making something new to take full advantage of ReScript.

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Then you need to add to ReScript the ability to configure JSX compilation. If I want to write my own solution for JSX - I can’t, also I can’t use SolidJS and another frameworks what using JSX.

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ReScript: strong type - strong code.

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For marketing purposes I think support for React is one of the main features. So we should market to React users as a target audience. Otherwise we should include guides on how to use ReScript with other frameworks like Vue, Angular, Ember, Solid. But then we might be spreading too thin. Hence I think marketing to the React community is more strategic for my understanding of the Rescript’s team resources and motivations.
I use Rescript mainly because it has a turn-key solution for React. If I had to learn Rescript + figure out how to make it work with React then I don’t think I would bother to learn it.

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I think not. Because JS has a lot of areas of application already. NodeJS, React Native, Vanilla and etc. JS is really flexible. ReScript has good chance to support it with strong types and fp features.

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ReScript: Come back to using promises.

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For reference, Elm’s slogan is this:

A delightful language for reliable web applications.

Talks about developer experience, the safety, and the main target in a succinct way.

Here is Elixir:

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications.

A bit more explicit in terms of technology, but mentioning the desirable traits of the applications.

Here is Gleam (which targets JS too with its latest release):

Gleam is a fast, friendly, and functional language for building type-safe, scalable systems!

And here is Typescript:

Typed JavaScript at Any Scale.

Lots of scalability words and other buzzy words thrown around. Personally, I think Typescript’s and Elm’s are the best slogans, with the least tech buzzwords on it, catchy and to the point.

Cramming everything in a slogan isn’t necessary, that’s why the rest of the main page has other headings and info. It should catch the attention of the reader to read more basically.

My 2 cents, I think yawaramin’s suggestion is good,

To provide another option, maybe we can swap some words around:

A solid and performant language for JavaScript applications

Reliable ~= Solid ~= Dependable ~= Trustworthy, etc. This speaks to the type system given reliability.

Performant speaks to how fast your code will run. No confusion with fast compiler, which is awesome but maybe not worth putting in the slogan. The optimizations rescript does to the output JS are very cool.

And what people write is applications, either in the client, server, or else, to me it sounds better than platforms.

In the end this is a subject prone to tremendous bikeshedding so make a call and run it through native speakers and move on :smiley:

As long as it isn’t something like “Cybernetically enhanced web apps”* it will be alright :stuck_out_tongue:

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