1y ago

Are there academic paradigms in web frontend dev in the same way there are FP academic paradigms?

I constantly hear about research into functional programming, and even real things coming out of them, like certain programming languages (idris).

Is there anything like this for frontend UI dev? It doesn't have to be FP related.

14 comments

On the web, there's semantic HTML and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which focus on making content for the Internet as broadly interoperable and accessible as possible. The former from a technical point of view, the latter from a human interaction point of view. They go together hand on hand.
AFAIK, Halogen for Purescript is about as FP as it gets in the front-end world. It’s pretty complicated but Halogen takes advantage of “free monads”. Perhaps you are looking for something even more rigorous since you mentioned Idris but I figured I’d mention that one.
I’m learning it now and it has not been easy. I tried to port a simple vanilla JavaScript dynamic draggable table over to Halogen and it has not been fun at all. I got 80% of the way there then started to have to reach for FFI, unsafeCoerce, or build my own Purescript module to capture mousevents.
Maybe Elm? It was the result of Evan Czaplicki's thesis.
At the rate frontend spits frameworks and languages it's pointless to write papers for it. Innovation on that field happens by bruteforce.
- “innovation”
  @TCB13 @programming
  
  😂😂😂
Have you looked at Elm?
It's very much not JavaScript, but I think that comes with the territory of wanting something significantly different.
For what it's worth, with wasm you could use any language that compiles to it as a frontend language. Rust has a few frameworks that can compile to standalone wasm web pages.
- I’m confused why everyone sleeps on Purescript. I mean, it is currently QUITE obscure.. I could be wrong but I feel like Purescript has all of the same goals as Elm but better.
  
  It does look pretty damn cool. One thing that bothers me is it is in the npm ecoystem :)
  
  I also sleep on elm, JavaScript and typescript. (i.e. don't use then)
  It's simply that I never heard of purescript.
Concepts like Reactive programming are widely used in web/UI contexts. The problem of connecting a UI to an underlying data set is not trivial. Several frameworks deal with this.
As was already said, concerns like Accessibility are studied academically. They have more to do with user experience than the technology, so not sure if they match your question.
htmx.org has tons of assays posted online. But I don't recall seeing any 'white paper' for frontend frameworks... maybe it's also related to "ux research" (if there's such thing) being more of a marketing discipline, and by its profit-seeking nature that's mostly secretive.

14 comments