Offer for help

[Pauan]

The first language I learned was JavaScript, and I've been using it for over 10 years.

But I've grown sick of it, so I've tried many different compile-to-JavaScript languages, including Haxe, Roy, ClojureScript, TypeScript, Elm, F#, and PureScript.

They are all good languages, but none of them had all the requirements I was looking for in a language:

• Purely functional

• Heavily encourages functional style

• Has ADTs and pattern matching

• Statically typed with a sound type system

• Good syntax

• Good module system

• Generates extremely small, fast, and efficient JavaScript code

• Really good FFI to JavaScript

The functional languages I tried all fail at the last two points (often because of currying).

Koka is different, though. It fulfills all my requirements (and then some). It's a fantastically well designed language. Very minimal, clean, concise, safe, fast, excellent FFI, and a lot of convenient features. As a Lisp programmer, I also really like being able to use - and ? in identifiers.

I'm especially impressed by the excellent error messages, which is something even production languages fail at. And the standard library is extremely high quality as well. I definitely wasn't expecting that from a research language.

Therefore, I plan to rewrite a ~10,000 line JavaScript program in Koka.

I'm also willing to help out to improve Koka. What's the current status of Koka? It seems to still be regularly updated, which is good, but are there any long-term plans?

Is there anything I can help out with, for example improving the documentation?

[anfelor]

Hi, are you still interested in Koka? There is now a tasks section in the readme: https://github.com/koka-lang/koka#tasks