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Discussion on: What made you switch your main programming language?

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derBingle • Edited

So as a relatively new dev, I got my feet wet in Node. Which I'm thankful for—I probably would have never even considered programming as a career option without the ecosystem that developed around it.

But a while back, I realized that I wasn't actually growing as a programmer much, just getting better and better at searching npm and find the right module to do what I wanted. So I decided to take a step back and learn another language, one with fewer existing modules, in order to force myself to write the code for myself, with the additional goal of moving in a more functional direction.

I ended up going with Reason/OCaml, in part because of the great support I saw coming from that community, and the inherent benefits of a statically + soundly typed language. Plus the escape hatch of always being able to compile to/interop with JS if I absolutely needed to.

I've written a couple of little CLI apps with it, hopefully putting the first one out in the public this week, and starting to convert my React Native project to Reason-React. And I can honestly say that I've learned more in the past 3-4 months than I have in the previous year. So far, so good!