I recently gave an internal talk at my work about the similarities of F# compared to JS. It was generally well received, and I would like to convert that talk into a blog post for others who may be interested.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of features in F#, but the point of this post is to show familiar JS code and how it can be written equivalently in F#, because I believe showing examples like this is the best way of learning a new language and has a better chance of adoption.

I’m going to explain some common monads that you can start using in your javascript today. Monads will help make your code easier to read, more maintainable and most importantly - safer.

Maybe

The Maybe monad is used for dealing with nullable data. Often we like to process data in javascript, like formatting, doing calculations, filtering and sorting. But often we need to make sure the data is there before doing anything. This is where Maybe can help.