How to appeal to fellow developers from other communities

[whitetigle]

Today we provide pixijs bindings for the following niche

niche#1 - Fable developers

who want to do game/multimedia development

niche#2 - .Net F# developers

who want to learn about the js ecosystem through Fable
--> who want to do game/multimedia development

niche#3 - .Net C# developers

who want to do functional programming
--> who are ok to learn F#
----> who want to learn about the js ecosystem through Fable
------> who want to do game/multimedia development

niche#4 - JS developers

who want to do functional programming
--> who are ok to learn F# and .Net
----> who are ok to come to the JS ecosystem indirectly through F# and Fable
------> who want to do game/multimedia development

I think we already appeal to niche#1 and #niche2.
But I have mixed feelings about how to appeal to #niche3 and #niche4.

What do you think?

[MangelMaxime]

I think we appeal niche#1 and niche#2 yes, even if the second isn't here yet I think because we need to show how Fable is better into game dev than F# over .Net.

If developers already got some experience with using F# for game dev then, they will think that F# and functional language are not made for that because of the lack of documentation.

In my opinion appealing niche#3 and niche#4 require the same approach for both (putting aside developer who don't want to learn another language or something not supported directly by Microsoft). We need to provide them good tooling and UX (UX is important for every niche better especially this ones).

I already have in mind some ideas since a long time and didn't took the time to play with. I will try to make something to help visualize my vision on this subject as it's seems the good time thanks to @whitetigle rework of Pixi bindings and samples.

[alfonsogarciacaro]

Thanks a lot for all these great samples and this nice summary @whitetigle!

About niche#3, it's very common for F# evangelists to try to appeal C# developers, and Phillip, the current F# PM at MSFT, is doing a great job to promote F# and Fable in .NET channels so I guess people interested will also see Pixi and the possibilities it offers (I'll make it more prominent in the website).

About niche#4, there's currently a movement of JS developers looking for a functional programming language, which is good but the competition is also fierce (Elm, PureScript, Reason...). I totally agree with @MangelMaxime and in my experience in Fable workshops with devs new to F#/Fable what usually impresses them the most is how the combination of IDE + type system guides them so nicely. To help create this impression in newcomers, I should fulfill my promise, and put together the Ionide Fable component so people can edit your samples online and immediately see the result, that'd be awesome!

[whitetigle]

I should fulfill my promise, and put together the Ionide Fable component so people can edit your samples online and immediately see the result, that'd be awesome!

That would be just awesome!
If I had in my hands a tool where I could call any JS libs to make samples - some codepen like tool for Fable - then I think I could really add much more samples and even graphical samples which would try to explain FP concepts to JS newcomers.

[inchingforward]

I wasn't sure where to mention this, but I made a very minimal Fable + Pixi template (it's filesystem only right now) that makes it easy to get started. If anyone wants me to do anything with it let me know, or if you want to take some or all of it and use it, feel free.

[whitetigle]

That's just great @inchingforward! 👏

Now I wonder, what would be the best move? Somehow I think that it would be great to link it somehow to sample-pixi so that people can really get started fast. What's your feeling?

[alfonsogarciacaro]

For starters I'd suggest:

• Publish to Nuget with name: Fable.Template.Pixi
• Add to awesome-fable, tweet about it
• Add a mention to it in Pixi samples, and another mention back to Pixi samples in the template README 😄