Reason Town Topics

reasontown
#1

Hi, friends!

@jaredly and I have been pretty slow at putting out new episodes, sorry about that. But we’re gearing up to record some more. Most of the shows will be a casual discussion between Jared and I about topics (projects, concepts, news, challenges) relating to Reason / Bucklescript, with some interviews with community members mixed in.

I’d love for you to reply to this thread with topics you’d like to hear us talk about (beginner or advanced, we’re happy to discuss both), and / or persons that you’d be interested in hearing an interview with.

And remember, take whatever we take with a grain of salt. We’re just a couple of guys learning this stuff as well ;).

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please check out https://reason.town/

#2

I would like to hear or get a canonical way of dealing with Json objects and with JS interop. Js.t, Js.Json.t. What is the difference between them and Object, records. What type of types ( :slight_smile: ) should be used and when.

What are these [@bs.deriving] (this touches BuckleScript, but anyway) A lot of folks try ReasonML and the first real task is to call REST and parse JSON and do something.

Are there plans for normal async support? Current usage of Js.Promise is…not very pleasant.

Also, according to stats I see in Weekly Reason newsletters, the most popular topic is TypeScript vs ReasonML. Maybe you could talk about this too.

ALso, thank you for running this podcast

#3

@gladimdim we’re working on a JSON solution soon

#4

Reason and styling would be a cool topic :grin:

#5

@gladimdim I agree that the ergonomics of Js.Promise leave a lot to be desired. Take a look at this: https://github.com/RationalJS/future. it provides a much cleaner interface to async code.

#6

Thanks @chenglou for being on the show!

Maybe Jordan would be willing to give an interview?

I’d like to hear some stories of people building cool things with ReasonML.

Or people who have shipped things to production.

Can we cover more abstract functional concepts? Similar to lambda casts but using ReasonML.

#7

I think some topics that are common:

  • JS interop, especially the differences between when to use records, [@bs.deriving abstract], Js.Json.t, Js.Dict, etc…
  • Polymorphic Variants vs normal variants
  • Functors, what they are, when to use them.
  • ReasonReact specific stuff
  • News about cool new libraries and language releases. There have been some really great things that have come out, would be great for more for people to know about that.
  • Production war stories, esspesially from Facebook.
#8

Documentation could be an interesting topic. For a start - how we got to where we are now in the current state of Reason documentation, thoughts about some of the weak points, how we can improve it and where contribution would be helpful.

Another idea is to follow the episode design of the New Rustacean podcast - they do ~20 minute episodes that explain a concept in detail. They are scripted beforehand and do a really excellent job at introducing different concepts of the Rust language. For example, here’s an episode that covers documentation in Rust: https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/e001/index.html and here’s one about the Rust type system: https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/e011/index.html

#9

I’d like to hear about people who are building projects that can target both buckle-script and native ocaml and how tooling, publishing and various tradeoffs are made to account for the differences between platforms.

#10

Oh. Jordan is on the latest podcast. You guys are quick! :stuck_out_tongue:

#11

This podcast is super cool! Thanks @jaredly and @splodingsocks! :heart: