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Imba – A new programming language for the web

imba.io

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Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#41

Post by shadowmint »

judofyr wrote: post #37
shadowmint wrote: post #24

This isn't a competitor to react; its a competitor to ES6/typescript/coffeescript. React is a template library, not a language. JSX is a way to write templates, but that's not react, and its not what react does. It's just a shortcut to writing XML. You could say this is a competitor to JSX, perhaps; but anything more is hyperbole. People aren't using react and angular because they have a nice syntax , that's just nic…

Imba includes syntax for tags (scroll down to "Tags"), virtual DOM diffing, event handling (with touch support). Yes, React is not a language in itself, but there's quite big overlap in what Imba does and what React+JSX does. You build UI components like this: tag event event.title "Happening on {event.dateString}"

No.

Read what I wrote again.

You just wrote a template. That's like JSX.

You ALSO need a library to do the virtaul dom stuff and/or data binding to write an application.

React. !=. JSX.

What you have here is a programming language that compiles to javascript and has an inbuilt templating language. So does ES6; `${hi}`.

That's a fundamental building block, not a replacement for a high level framework, like react.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#42

Post by jlebrech »

shadowmint wrote: post #24

This isn't a competitor to react; its a competitor to ES6/typescript/coffeescript. React is a template library, not a language. JSX is a way to write templates, but that's not react, and its not what react does. It's just a shortcut to writing XML. You could say this is a competitor to JSX, perhaps; but anything more is hyperbole. People aren't using react and angular because they have a nice syntax , that's just nic…

I guess the title should be JS/React

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#43

Post by judofyr »

meowface wrote: post #27

I actually think this looks really good, but 3 things: 1. Why differentiate it from CoffeeScript so much? Why not call it DOMCoffeeScript or something? Are there any core language changes from CoffeeScript other than the tag features? 2. I'm not sure how I feel about the mixture of XML tag characters with HAML/Jade-like indentation. My gut instinct is to always look for a closing tag with XML/HTML. Why not use some k…

1. Because the semantics are quite different. See my other post.

2. It's still nice to separate the attributes from the content:

     "Foo"
Why use a new syntax when everyone knows HTML/XML?

3. The lack of `var` in CoffeeScript is its worst feature ever IMO! Every time I write `someVariable = …` I'm terrified that I will accidentally overwrite a previous variable. Imba improves on JavaScript here and will correctly shadow multiple `var` in the same function.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#44

Post by tracker1 »

joeminichino wrote: post #11

This is good! Now take away all the unnecessary references to that pile of junk that is ruby and it'll be great.

I don't know that I agree with that... a lot of the syntax definitely burrows from Ruby, but then again so does CoffeeScript... this actually looks a lot like CoffeeScript with embedded razor templating.

I think this is either developed by or targeted at people with a ruby background, and does give some context. I'm actually more happy with something closer to JS (EX6/7 transpiling) with React (JSX) than something like this. Usually when you approach headaches on larger teams with JS, it's more that you haven't broken things down as well as you can/should more than a language construct.

JS projects tend to work far better from discrete separations of components, views, functions and composites... simple components can be thought of react components that only use properties for rendering, views are a composition of components that use stores for state interaction. Functions are modules that have singular discrete testable functionality and composites are similar to classes but yeild an object tethered to state/options but mainly glued together from modules that expose a single workflow function.

There's also control/workflow type composition, and node-style object pipes tend to work very well in many of those scenarios... get batch of items from db into an object stream through workflow steps, queues, etc.

It's definitely an interesting abstraction of a few ideas together, I'm not sure what it does in terms of improving a larger workflow. Other than a more wrist friendly syntax.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#46

Post by judofyr »

dugmartin wrote: post #40
judofyr wrote: post #14

Disclaimer: I've been following the development of Imba while it's been a private project (for six years now). Lately I've been helping out fixing bugs and improving smaller parts of the language. Having tags as a proper part of the language is very nice. This just works in Imba: for event in @events if event:type == "like" elif event:type == "comment" In React I'd have to use `map` and refactor parts into variables.…

You can do that right now with CoffeeScript+React and it looks almost identical: {ul, li} = React.DOM # require in like and comment components here... ul {}, for event in @events li {}, if event.type is "like" like {event: event} else if event.type is "comment" comment {event: event}

Yup, that looks pretty good.

Imba was started before React was available so it wasn't an option back then. As for today, the language integrates tags in a much nicer way than what's possible with CoffeeScript + React. This especially pays off performance-wise.

Although Imba was started before React it should be noted that it didn't include virtual diffing until React showed that it worked.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#47

Post by curveship »

meowface wrote: post #27

I actually think this looks really good, but 3 things: 1. Why differentiate it from CoffeeScript so much? Why not call it DOMCoffeeScript or something? Are there any core language changes from CoffeeScript other than the tag features? 2. I'm not sure how I feel about the mixture of XML tag characters with HAML/Jade-like indentation. My gut instinct is to always look for a closing tag with XML/HTML. Why not use some k…

I can't speak to #1 and 2, but for #3, one of the criticisms of CoffeeScript has been that defining local variables and modifying variables from an outer scope have the same syntax. I.e., if I see `foo = 1` in a piece of code, I don't know if it's creating a local variable called foo or modifying a variable called foo from a containing scope -- the only way to tell is to scan all the containing scopes for a variable called foo. Even worse, let's say a piece of code had an inner function that declared a variable foo, but I then declare a variable called foo in an outer scope. That inner statement now silently switches from declaration to modification. I suspect this is why they force the use of `var` for declaration -- it disambiguates the two cases

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#48

Post by mangeletti »

untog wrote: post #35
mangeletti wrote: post #31

I have to admit I was really not excited to see this: var answer = if number == 42 The language looks shockingly pleasant in a number of ways, but everything being an expression seems odd. Would somebody mind helping me understand the value (semantic, performance, etc.) of such a choice?

CoffeeScript (which this is forked from) has some parts like this that I strongly dislike, such as using the unless keyword after an action. For example: doSomeThing() unless person.present For me that utterly destroys readability - in my mind, when I see a (), that function is being called there and then. The fact that you can invalidate that later in the line confuses me deeply - and it doesn't really provide any b…

To play devil's advocate, when using Python's ternary operator like this:

    something() if False else y
The `something` function is never called.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#49

Post by tracker1 »

judofyr wrote: post #43
meowface wrote: post #27

I actually think this looks really good, but 3 things: 1. Why differentiate it from CoffeeScript so much? Why not call it DOMCoffeeScript or something? Are there any core language changes from CoffeeScript other than the tag features? 2. I'm not sure how I feel about the mixture of XML tag characters with HAML/Jade-like indentation. My gut instinct is to always look for a closing tag with XML/HTML. Why not use some k…

1. Because the semantics are quite different. See my other post. 2. It's still nice to separate the attributes from the content: "Foo" Why use a new syntax when everyone knows HTML/XML? 3. The lack of `var` in CoffeeScript is its worst feature ever IMO! Every time I write `someVariable = …` I'm terrified that I will accidentally overwrite a previous variable. Imba improves on JavaScript here and will correctly shadow…

People also know CSS query selectors...

    
      
       Some Text
Might be nicer than actually spelling out the attributes and properties, if you're taking an already wrist friendly language and bolting on tags, then taking that a step farther would probably be a nice idea as well.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#50

Post by kbenson »

shadowmint wrote: post #24

This isn't a competitor to react; its a competitor to ES6/typescript/coffeescript. React is a template library, not a language. JSX is a way to write templates, but that's not react, and its not what react does. It's just a shortcut to writing XML. You could say this is a competitor to JSX, perhaps; but anything more is hyperbole. People aren't using react and angular because they have a nice syntax , that's just nic…

My first thought as well, even though I know little except the marketing about React. It's like if someone said "Foo: a new competitor to Rails", or "Bar: a new competitor to Vim".

That's not to say I wouldn't be interested in reading about a language that could somehow compete with Vim, if that was an accurate statement.

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