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Imba: A new programming language for web apps

imba.io

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Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#31

Post by randallsquared »

smt88 wrote: post #27
randallsquared wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The widely adopted example was node.js; Elm was my example of a system that has had strong influence on widely adopted systems (like React/Redux).

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#33

Post by clentaminator »

golergka wrote: post #5

To all people who reply negatively to this: don't you guys actually like learning new languages? Why?

Learning yet another new language for the sake of just knowing another language? Not particularly.

There's an incredible amount of churn in the web languages/frameworks arena. A few years ago it seemed like every week another PHP "MVC" framework was released with exactly the same features as the last one, but with claims that it was faster, more robust, more extensible, and so on. At one point the "big players" were CakePHP and CodeIgniter. Now they seem to be Symfony and Laravel, but feature-wise there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of difference to how your application is structured in these particular frameworks.

Now the churn seems to have shifted away from PHP to JS and JS build systems, and lo and behold we have Imba, "a new programming language for the web".

Sometimes these tools offer clear advantages, other times not so. But often the lifespan on these seems to be less than a year. Everyone is excited about Backbone for six months, until Ember comes out and now no one talks about Backbone. But then Angular comes out and no-one talks about Ember. Investing time in learning any new tool can feel like a huge waste of time when there's a high chance that said tool will disappear a year or so down the line.

Moving this away from the land of web, a new language should at the very least offer a new perspective on something, for example Rust's approach to memory management is intriguing enough for it to potentially be worthwhile.

I like learning new skills and techniques. A language with a different syntax and some sugar-coating that is fundamentally the same as something I already know isn't that.

But maybe I'm just bitter ;)

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#38

Post by sindreaa »

woah wrote: post #34

Is it actually 10x faster than React? If you're not doing shouldComponentUpdate, then the benchmark is misleading.

React and Imba can both optimize using shouldComponenUpdate (in Imba you would add the same logic inside node#commit). Utilising shouldComponentUpdate (in React and Imba) requires additional logic by the developer, not the framework. This is not an optimisation at the framework level - but an endpoint where the developer can write their own custom optimisations. Adding your own manual checks all around your app to check for statechanges is inelegant, cumbersome, and bug prone. In my opinion it defeats much of the purpose of a virtual dom, if you are expected to do your own diffing before sending it through. Also, the relative performance difference is about the same when turning it on.

I fully stand behind the benchmark, and would even go as far as saying that it is more relevant for real world applications than benchmarks like dbmonster where everything in the view updates on every render. This effectively tries to calculate how quickly each contestant can reconcile the whole view (synchronously), but when only parts of the view has actually changed.

Here is some additional discussion about the benchmark: https://github.com/somebee/imba/issues/9

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#40

Post by JustSomeNobody »

estefan wrote: post #25

All 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...).

These are devs who would rather build tools to build a web app than to build a web app. Different people have different itches. We don't have to consume what they produce. Just have to read about it on HN.
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