I am proud to announce Neon, an alternative prelude (standard library) for PureScript. If you haven’t heard of PureScript, it’s a language like Haskell that compiles to JavaScript. To learn more about it, check out my Better know a language: PureScript presentation.

Why make a standard library? Two reasons:

1. It takes a lot of imports to do anything useful in PureScript. This can be fixed in other ways, such as creating a “batteries included” prelude that pulls in the most useful packages. (That’s exactly what my Batteries library does.) Unfortunately many packages don’t work well with this approach since they require qualified imports to avoid collisions. For example, look at how many packages define singleton. You can’t have all those in one namespace.

2. PureScript (and Haskell) can be hard to read. You often have to read expressions from the inside out to really understand what they do. In extreme cases, you have to read lines both forwards and backwards at the same time. Operators like $ and <<< sometimes help, but they can be hard to understand if you’re not already familiar with them.

I think Neon fixes both of those problems. To get a feel for what it looks like, let’s solve problem 1 on Project Euler with both Neon and the traditional prelude. Here is a solution using Neon:

import Neon

main :: Eff (console :: CONSOLE) Unit
main = 1
  :upTo 999
  :filter (divisibleBy 3 || divisibleBy 5)
  :sum
  :print

And for comparison, here is the same solution without Neon:

import Control.Monad.Eff (Eff)
import Control.Monad.Eff.Console (CONSOLE, print)
import Data.Array (filter, (..))
import Data.Foldable (sum)
import Prelude

main :: Eff (console :: CONSOLE) Unit
main
  = print
  <<< sum
  <<< filter (\ n -> n `mod` 3 == 0 || n `mod` 5 == 0)
  $ 1 .. 999

I much prefer reading and writing the Neon version. The whole thing reads from left to right and top to bottom. It only uses two operators, : and ||. And of course it only has one import.