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Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

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Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#231

Post by vosper »

meepmorp wrote: post #220
system2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exact opposite of Elastic.co.

Every time I consult their docs, I feel like I have less of a handle on the topic than when I started.

I think this might be partly due to the query language being JSON? It makes every example huge and hard to understand. JSON is a serialization format that's human-readable, it's not a human-first language. So it's a pity that's how you're expected to write searches (I know they have some SQL support now, but I've never seen it in the docs)

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#232

Post by masklinn »

yunyu wrote: post #180
masklinn wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes all promise-generating code can be and is properly annotated, though.

Typescript will cover this!

Typescript lets you call into un-annotated libraries or annotate things as `any` or whatever.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#233

Post by lhorie »

Bellamy wrote: post #221
antattack wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that site does not specify is the Imba's license (MIT)

What does it mean for projects build using imba?

Nothing you should worry about. MIT is a very permissive license.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#234

Post by Mikeb85 »

savmat wrote: post #74

I’m sick of programming languages that use “fast typing” and “productiveness” as a selling point. There’s no selling point in being productive doing a counter in a few seconds, production scenarios are far more complex and very often all those new programming languages fall short to their promise. Btw I don’t want to be fast or productive, I want to write code that works decently and is great for other humans myself…

Then don't use it. Some of us do like productive (ie. expressive and batteries included) languages. PHP, Python, JavaScript and Ruby still power most websites. There's plenty of choices for enterprise languages and frameworks if you want.

Productive, everything included languages/frameworks such as this are great for freelancers, designers, students, and anyone who wants to get up and running quickly. You can also still create maintainable projects with expressive languages (Google and Python, GitHub and Ruby are a couple examples).

People are doing things that don't break with 'productive' languages.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#235

Post by dec0dedab0de »

kingdomcome50 wrote: post #146
klibertp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? How is that a problem, why would it be something that's best avoided, and why simply displaying all three files at once in one of a million ways available is not a solution?

I don’t see any added value of separating pieces of a component into different files. The CSS, JS, and HTML are all logically coupled no matter how you organize them. At best you will achieved a few smaller files. At worst you make working within the system a real pain.

I think its much more of a pain to have more than one language in the same file, but I suppose that's a matter of preference.

Some practical reasons for separate files, off the top of my head:

In-lining JS, and CSS means enabling unsafe-eval, which can open up XSS vulnerabilities if you use any content from users or gathered from a source you don't control. You could also do the unsafe-hashes, but that's kind of a pain.

If you're not making a SPA, it would not be fun to copy the CSS to all of your files.

If you do not couple your CSS to your site, you can reuse it across many sites and have the same style. Say if you have separate site for your blog, but want it to look the same as your main site.

If you're working on a team splitting things up into separate files will avoid some merge conflicts.

Chances are they will not be updated all at the same time, so caching would speed up page load times, as the user would only have to download the changed files

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#237

Post by mdtusz »

Dah00n wrote: post #75
tannhaeuser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The distinction between HTML, JS and CSS always made perfect sense to me. Really? HTML is already heavy on syntax, and the whole point of SGML-style angle-bracket markup is to invisibly structure text hierarchically and sneak in rendering properties or other "metadata" not rendered to the user, via attributes. In which universe, then, has it ever made sense to write rather than in a document representation language…

Not that I disagree that what we have today is a big mess but this sounds to me almost like the philosophy behind the old PHP version that everyone seems to hate. Personally I'd much rather have everything separated in a better HTML/CSS/JS than HTML+CSS+JS in one big pile. But I'm also not a fan of JavaScript at all, especially not of the hyped "one framework today, another tomorrow" that is JS development today. In…

I think we're well past the period of a new framework every week - at least in a "real world" sense. Nearly all companies will settle on react or vue these days with a long tail choosing others, but this is no different than any other part of software development - lots of different databases, web frameworks, auth libraries etc all exist as well and are used.

Most of these "new" frameworks are more because someone wanted to scratch an itch or solve a specific problem they had, and frontend code simply lends itself well to being open sourced. If you don't like the new js tools that are made, just ignore them.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#238

Post by brundolf »

armchairhacker wrote: post #228

Usually I think trying to make your own language for anything more than a DSL is a bad idea. But this project looks very impressive. I've never heard of Imba before this post and haven't seen any real-world projects (besides Scrimba). If this is as good as it looks we'll probably get some soon. Reminds me of Elm which took a similar route and seems to be successful. As someone else said, one thing you probably want i…

> Usually I think trying to make your own language for anything more than a DSL is a bad idea.

Depends what "your own" means. If it's a one-off language just for one specific project, then you're right. But this one is much more than that. Surely you don't think people should stop making new languages entirely?

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#239

Post by randomdata »

ourcat wrote: post #224
randomdata wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you are being critical of React. There is nothing about React that prevents you from separating the HTML and CSS into separate files. You are being critical of separation choices. To which I am curious why embedding the CSS and HTML inside a Javascript file makes any difference to the designer? In practice, we often see slightly different syntax to accommodate, but I cannot imagine that is a true barrier…

I build all the components and get them working with mostly 'vanilla' styling. Then he brands/styles any he needs to by simply editing the .html and .scss files. He has no idea about how the TypeScript/JavaScript files work. He doesn't really have to touch them, unless to maybe see what extra data the component model contains if he wanted to dig deeper and display other things.

Does he need to know how the Javascript files work, though? The HTML/CSS parts are still logically separated from the rest of the code. I am not sure someone who is capable of working on that type of content would struggle to recognize them. As long as the team is consistent, you can even reasonably predict exactly where such content would be found in the file.

If the designer was handed an HTML page with tags embedded, I cannot imagine he would fall down unable to figure out where the CSS is, and this is not much different.

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