Why not use the more familiar C-syntax of JavaScript?
I came here to ask exactly that. Sounds to me like learn a new thing just for the hype of it...
Imba: A new programming language for web apps
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#22How does it compare to the amazingly fast ur/web?
It doesn't? It's closer to Coffescript I think.
ur/web might be hard to get into for someone who doesn't have ML or Haskell experience.
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think existing programmers sometimes forget that there's more people who /will/ program than who /do/ program. They have existing biases: towards extra tokens, separation of concerns by separating technologies rather than components, and other newer concepts that they legitimately do find strange. People making programming languages are much better suited by targeting non-programmers: existing devs are often simply…
"People making programming languages are much better suited by targeting non-programmers: existing devs are often simply not their audience." In this case I'd argue it would be better for non-programmers to learn JavaScript before a language which compiles to it.
I get a little confused when people say they "compile" x scripting language into y scripting language.
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
"People making programming languages are much better suited by targeting non-programmers: existing devs are often simply not their audience." In this case I'd argue it would be better for non-programmers to learn JavaScript before a language which compiles to it.
I agree with that: these languages often don't have devtools, so they have to look at the compiled output to fix bugs. This makes for an unpleasant learning experinece. Once these tools fix the DevTools situation they'll be a lot more useful.
Imba is still lacking when it comes to devtools, but it does have full support for source mapping, and the sublime text plugin includes inline error messages from the compiler.
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#25All these languages du jour should go out of their way to answer the question: "why bother?".
10x faster than react. OK cool. Except unless it has something like react native it's irrelevant if you might want to write an app in future with any sort of code reuse since you'll be tied to the web (unless you want the inevitable world-of-pain of trying to integrate this preprocessor into your xcode/android builds...).
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#26Why not use the more familiar C-syntax of JavaScript?
This is actually a fork of Coffescript that used Python-inspired syntax.
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#27To all people who reply negatively to this: don't you guys actually like learning new languages? Why?
I do like learning new languages, but there's a certain amount of fatigue in this particular space, given the pace of announcements and limited time. There's a worry that one could spend all one's available time for learning new things and have learned nothing of value in two years. For this to be of value, it has to provide at least one of four things: 1. Becoming a widely-adopted system (like node.js) 2. Strong inf…
Even Elm is far from widely adopted, though I agree it has really captured people's attention
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#28All these languages du jour should go out of their way to answer the question: "why bother?". 10x faster than react. OK cool. Except unless it has something like react native it's irrelevant if you might want to write an app in future with any sort of code reuse since you'll be tied to the web (unless you want the inevitable world-of-pain of trying to integrate this preprocessor into your xcode/android builds...).
A few months ago I played with ImbaKit (https://github.com/judofyr/ImbaKit) which is essentially React Native iOS implemented on top of Imba. It's just an experiment for now, but there's only time and money which stops this from becoming a proper tool.
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#29Yay! Another new programming language for hipsters! Another pointless technology to learn! For god sakes, use js &co, clojure, or elm. Nothing else is worth it.
You know your examples were/are considered new languages at one point, right?
Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps
#30All these languages du jour should go out of their way to answer the question: "why bother?". 10x faster than react. OK cool. Except unless it has something like react native it's irrelevant if you might want to write an app in future with any sort of code reuse since you'll be tied to the web (unless you want the inevitable world-of-pain of trying to integrate this preprocessor into your xcode/android builds...).
> "why bother?".
Surely the answer to that is obvious: because building webapps in js/html/css is a major pain in the arse.