(As of 12/2017, relicensed to straight MIT from BSD+patent.)
Rauschmayer's work here makes me interested in the language and motivated to learn it. After reading more, only wish I'd explored for a recent project where I was working to implement a lot of functional patterns in native JS.
Any thoughts about ReasonML vs "straight" OCaml? (Or does that question even make sense?)
Someone can correct me, but Reason is just a syntax on top of Ocaml's compiler. Bucklescript and Reason even share the same site design. there's not much of a choice beyond what you like more, as they use the same libraries, tools, etc.
Does anyone know where this new wave of interest came from?
Community. The Reason team focused on building it, and neatly embraced and nurtured BuckleScript in the process. It's a symbiotic relationship and the community has a reputation for being very newbie-friendly to boot.
> Any thoughts about ReasonML vs "straight" OCaml?
I've heard of (and from) web developers who say that they find OCaml impossible to read, but that ReasonML is easy and pleasant for them. So part of this is what you are used to, and another is subjective preference.
As someone that got introduced to ML via Caml Light, I really don't have any issue with OCaml's syntax, which seems to be the only reason (no pun intended) for ReasonML's existence.
It's a good question. Reason includes some major syntactic conveniences that make the JavaScript interop more pleasant to work with. One of the biggest ones is that it introduces a first-class syntactic JavaScript object literal (i.e. a Reason/BuckleScript value which will compile down to a JavaScript literal) and which makes writing JS objects much more pleasant.
There are other conveniences as well, including the fact that Reason comes with a tool (refmt) that can autoformat your code to a standard style, wiping out style guide arguments etc.
https://github.com/facebook/reason/commit/e8fb73ec6ff7c31367...
(As of 12/2017, relicensed to straight MIT from BSD+patent.)
Rauschmayer's work here makes me interested in the language and motivated to learn it. After reading more, only wish I'd explored for a recent project where I was working to implement a lot of functional patterns in native JS.
Any thoughts about ReasonML vs "straight" OCaml? (Or does that question even make sense?)