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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

#291

Post by Shorel »

__ryan__ wrote: post #70
mg wrote: post #5

One thing that irks me about Javascript is "const". I think it should have been called "con". "var", "let", "con". So the first thing I did here is look up the docs and see how variables are declared. Aaarghh.. "let" and "const" again :)

I've thought about this a lot. I considered "con" for constants. I don't hate it. It also works as a double entendre-- "con" in Spanish means "with". So the following code could be read as "with name equal to Brad". con name = 'Brad' I can't help but feel that it's somewhat jarring though. If I had my druthers, I think I would choose "var" and "def" to declare mutable and immutable variables, respectively. def PI = 3…

Spanish native here. I would never read it like that.

I have programmed in a couple languages where every single keyword was in Spanish: Logo and some flavours of Visual Basic.

Either everything is in English, or everything is in Spanish. There's no middle ground with mixed keywords.

'Var' and 'def' both sound good to me.

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

#292

Post by sidlls »

lyaa wrote: post #277
sidlls wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, not really. I've worked at some big companies, and currently at one you almost certainly have heard about in the news. The features you describe don't justify the complexity of these apps. Usually these features are implemented without any real consideration for the overall architecture, independently, and within a bubble such that the engineers and PMs on the project locally maximize the feature's complexity.…

I think we differ in what we consider "justification." It seems to me that you are using the moral judgement of the sacrifice of perfect-pretty-code while I am considering the business-operations evaluation. For a company which needs teams to implement features independently, the bubble you judge to be negative could indeed be an acceptable, or even necessary, compromise. The business decision to have independent tea…

I don't disagree with your last paragraph. I think we just disagree on where that line is reasonably drawn.

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

#293

Post by lowercased »

cxr wrote: post #193
lowercased wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how you got from this that I was saying that there's no different between react and imba, or that it's not snappy/fast. I was just saying that for the majority of LOB apps I'm working on, whether a table of 2000 entries renders in .2 seconds or .3 seconds has no meaningful impact on the client projects I'm working on. Even though it's a 50% slowdown, or 33% speed up, depending on how you measure, that speed…

> Not sure how you got from this that I was saying that there's no different between react and imba, or that it's not snappy/fast And I'm not sure where you got that I got that you were saying that. What I am saying is a direct challenge to what you wrote—no need to repeat yourself. I'm saying, positively, that the common standards in React projects produce bloat that is perceptible—in cases I had in mind, FWIW, that…

> "imba.io and the site for Scrimba are way snappy. ...Is it possible that being elbow deep in this stuff has dulled your senses?"

That.

Yes, it's eons. I get that. But the time/effort required to make modifications to be faster isn't something that my some of my clients - with limited budgets - are asking for.

Some are, and they care about speed. Typically there's lower hanging fruit in server side query optimization, reduced payload sizes, etc. But I'm sure you already know that.

I agree with most of your closing paragraph too, btw.

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

#295

Post by alanbernstein »

dathinab wrote: post #168
dt2m wrote: post #31

Looks cool. I'm honestly curious as to why a lot of new web languages/frameworks are mixing logic and content in the same file again though. The distinction between HTML, JS and CSS always made perfect sense to me. Anyone care to enlighten me?

(Disclaimer not a web but backend dev.) In my experience it's much more important to modularize/capsulate/segmentate by groupings of business logic then by groupings of implementation details. Applying this to web applications (not simple text focused websites) this would mean that its preferable to have everything (HTML+JS+CSS) related to a specific widget (e.g. counter) in one place, instead of splitting it into ma…

Interesting, that makes sense. I'm thinking about a CLI analogy: you could write a program in C for the logic, some table specification markup language for the terminal layout, and a stylesheet for the colors and text styles. It would feel so cumbersome. The distinction between creating a document and a program is critical.

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

#296

Post by Tucanix »

This is just a clone of Svelte? It even has one of the same examples.. and similar syntax.

Better productivity is nice, but putting an abstracting in the way could be worse because it hides stuff from you you would otherwise learn or even make better yourself, this is also how we get slow apps which web based applications are infamous for. We need more native apps and new areas to explore not more of the same billion JavaScript libraries etc. JavaScript is brain rot for programmers and places creative people in tiny bloated slow sandboxes where they create carbon copies of each other. I hope someone finds it useful, i don't mean to rag on about this particular project.

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

#297

Post by trafnar »

xrd wrote: post #156

The thing I'm looking for, and didn't see it immediately on the example page, is how easily you can use JavaScript libraries. I'm sure you can, but is it like Svelte, where you can just use them almost as-is, or like React and Vue, where you need to wrap them inside special wrapper libraries that expose them as React hooks or whatever. Svelte is so great because you can use libraries as is. React is great (if you lik…

You can import any node module and use it with imba syntax. I’ve never had a problem doing this.

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

#298

Post by hakube »

soheil wrote: post #276
nsonha wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Create a good language and people will flock. What a truthfully useless statement. "Good" means having opinions about things that dont matter? Like "I don't like that css uses full words, I prefer these acronyms" Who gives a shit? Is this language designed to prevent copy pasting? You may be on to something here.

No that's not what good is, I in fact love languages with concise syntax, Java is probably the worst in that department.

Really? Java has the best syntax out there. It's consistent and very easy to read unlike Go, Rust or the modern languages these days

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

#299

Post by dragonwriter »

hakube wrote: post #298
soheil wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that's not what good is, I in fact love languages with concise syntax, Java is probably the worst in that department.

Really? Java has the best syntax out there. It's consistent and very easy to read unlike Go, Rust or the modern languages these days

> Java has the best syntax out there

De gustibus non est disputandum

> It's consistent and very easy to read unlike Go, Rust or the modern languages these days

Eh, its Algol-style syntax with a bunch of unique flourishes, like...lots of popular languages. Its nothing special, but its not especially consistent.

If your experience is heavily in Java, then it is probably particularly consistent (with your experience) and readable to you, but it doesn't seem to have any features that make it more of either of those than most popular languages in any general, not-experience-dependent, sense.

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

#300

Post by arcanon »

nsonha wrote: post #289
phil294 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding types, you're right, though JSDoc can get you very far Regarding perf (performance, I guess?) - are you speaking of the single, global one? As CS takes care of variable scoping automatically, I think it makes a lot of sense (and is deactivatable anyway)

no coffeescript desugars into functions things like switch statements, do statements and some other things (that have nothing to do with functions)

Just tried a switch statement, didnt desugar into functions. Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with the latest.
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