Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Imba – A new programming language for the web

imba.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 180 posts

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#61

Post by untog »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #54
untog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not specific to 'unless' – it's the general postcondition style that's is derived from Ruby. Indeed, for single-line if statement bodies in Ruby, it's the recommended style. It fits the style of Ruby to try and cut down on syntax noise where it's not needed. Contrast: save! if !record.persisted? && !record.invalid? save! unless record.persisted? || record.invalid? Though I do appreciate it's a bit unusual comp…

That's not really the part of unless that bothers me - it's the order. Why not do:

    if !record.persisted? && !record.invalid?
        save!
or:

    unless record.persisted? || record.invalid?
        save!

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#62

Post by WorldMaker »

andybak wrote: post #26
TeMPOraL wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. "Transpile" is "compile" for those who're too young to ever have worked with a compiled language.

I suppose the idea is that 'compile' implies a low-level target whereas 'transpile' suggests translating to another high-level language. I can see some sense in making this distinction.

In the larger linguistics world you have a distinction between "translation" (conversion between languages) and "transliteration" (conversion between forms of a language; cursive writing versus typing versus speech, for instance). I remember this being a particularly important distinction in learning American Sign Language (ASL) because the vocabulary is roughly English-ish it is very easy to transliterate and try to say in ASL an English sentence "as is" without meaningful changes, but just with dealing with the differences between, say, English and Spanish, to speak ASL properly you need to actually translate to more idiomatic forms and abstractions. This is extremely important to ASL not just from a "speak better ASL" standpoint but also because it comes out of a foundational, cultural imperative: ASL was not seen as "a real language" until it proven to some linguists that it validly needed translation, was not just a transliteration of English but in fact a language with its own idioms and grammar requiring translation. This disagreement is so fundamental to ASL also because there was so much pressure from people to "speak real English" rather than develop their own language. There is a transliteration-focused "alternative" to ASL that includes all of the useless English grammar and stutter words like "the" that ASL handles grammatically different, and ASL had to prove its existence against it and also to prove that it was better and also to prove that ASL speakers could still read/write English to work with the rest of the English-speaking country when their native language was grammatically different enough to require translation... It's an interesting cultural battle to read about.

All of which is a long winded example to get back to the idea that the translation/transliteration difference is very similar to the compilation/transpilation difference and while I don't think we've yet seen a cultural battle for supremacy between the terms, I do think there is a usefulness in keeping the distinction. I also see the conversion between idioms/abstractions as being the key difference between compilation and transpilation. Machine language has much different idioms/abstractions from a high-level language; CoffeeScript and TypeScript try to stay very similar in idiom/abstraction to EcmaScript.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#63

Post by kbenson »

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…

As a Perl programmer, I'm often using contructs like that, and I think they have a place, but you should restrain yourself from using them in places where they can easily be misunderstood.

For example, they work really well in loop control statements:

  for my $i (1 .. 100) {
    next if $i == 10;
    next if skippable($i);
    last if is_what_we_want($i);

    # Do stuff here
  }
Or more complex param validation

  sub foo( $arg1, $arg2 ) {
    return unless $arg1 > 10;
    die "Invalid argument arg2!" unless defined $arg2 and $arg2 =~ /^(?:CAT|DOG|GERBIL)$/;

    # Do something
  }
That said, I don't like it for assignment of in that manner (at least where the assigned value comes out of the if), because the main justification for allowing it (it's a natural extension of how we think) doesn't follow. A ternary operator is better in that instance, IMHO.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#65

Post by untog »

vlunkr wrote: post #56
untog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well just don't use the unless keyword then. I've used CS for years and I don't use it.

Well sure. But I live in a weird world where I sometimes have to work with code other people wrote, as well as my own.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#66

Post by benaston »

cpursley wrote: post #64
SomeoneWeird wrote: post #8

I lot of these things are basically irrelevant if you use ES6/7.

Are brackets and semicolons now optional in ES6/7?

Semicolons have always been optional. Brackets are only used for array literals (oh and destructuring assignment) as far as I know (and are required).

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#67

Post by dopamean »

Why do people keep throwing around the idea that "X tool is Y times faster than React?" Last I checked no one was claiming React is super fast and I don't know anyone who uses it for its speed. It just seems like such a strange thing. It's like building a new car and claiming it's 100 times faster than riding a horse.

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#68

Post by findjashua »

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}"

just so i understand this correctly - you also handle diffing & patching the virtual dom? If so, a few questions:

1. how much of the speedup is due to replacing JSX, and how much due to replacing the diffing algorithm.

2. how do you improve on the diffing speed, is it due to immutable data structures underneath, or something?

3. do you also provide mount/unmount hooks for the components?

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#69

Post by kbenson »

untog wrote: post #61
matthewmacleod wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not specific to 'unless' – it's the general postcondition style that's is derived from Ruby. Indeed, for single-line if statement bodies in Ruby, it's the recommended style. It fits the style of Ruby to try and cut down on syntax noise where it's not needed. Contrast: save! if !record.persisted? && !record.invalid? save! unless record.persisted? || record.invalid? Though I do appreciate it's a bit unusual comp…

That's not really the part of unless that bothers me - it's the order. Why not do: if !record.persisted? && !record.invalid? save! or: unless record.persisted? || record.invalid? save!

The behavior here, if it comes from Ruby, almost definitely has it's legacy in Perl, so you can look to Perl for justifications. The main justification is likely to be that's a natural construct of how we think and communicate, so why not allow us to express ourselves that way?

Another way to look at it is why do you think the conditional should come before like you've shown? Because C or even older languages started with that? If you didn't have prior experience with that form, would you still think it's inherently better, or would the trade-offs between the two forms seem slightly more balanced?

Re: Imba – A new programming language for the web

#70

Post by RobertKerans »

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.…

Can't really comment re the language (the tags as part of the language is very nice, I agree), but it's been in development for 6 years and there are no docs? If it were just a Coffeescript fork & just basically a matter of syntax, then maybe fair enough (but LiveScript & CS both have relatively extensive docs), but this project has much grander claims (ie that it's also a high-level framework competitor) + a grand total of a single page of basic info + no particularly useful source code comments. Sorry to dis a project you're connected to, it just doesn't look good in that respect
Post reply on HN