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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

#101

Post by Drup »

manyoso wrote: post #84
nerdwaller wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well put. I've been keeping an eye on elm (elm-lang.org) for a bit to see if it stands the test of enough time for me to decide to try it out. It, at least as far as I've seen, tries to address these concerns. But who knows, maybe it's just more noise.

FWIW, having tried Elm, I was very impressed with: 1) Type checking... yay! 2) Awesome compiler error messages that help fix #1 3) Purely functional language with immutable data structures helping performance 4) Reasonably easy and well thought out encapsulation mechanism via modules On the other hand I was put off by: 1) Very opinionated about design patterns with a react style gui framework 2) Signals are hard to e…

You could be interested by http://ocsigen.org/

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#102

Post by dang »

chvid wrote: post #16
temp wrote: post #2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10866540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091454

Getting thru at HN takes multiple submission it seems. Even for a big project like this.

It 'got through' on the first try: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091454.

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#103

Post by nilliams »

wnevets wrote: post #98
manyoso wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was designed from the very beginning by Eich to look like Java and not because subsequent people tried to "fix" it. Where are you getting this stuff?

ES2015 just added the class keyword to make it look like java last year. IIRC the new keyword wasn't part of javascript in those first two weeks when javascript was released. Where are you getting this stuff?

'class' wasn't added to make it look like Java. It was added as sugar for a common pattern that everyone was already using. Many languages other than Java have a class keyword.

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#104

Post by marknutter »

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...).

The React core team themselves admit that React Native is not about code-reuse, but instead what they call "learn-once-read-everywhere" To require that all javaScript web frameworks compile down to native app code is ridiculous.

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#106

Post by wnevets »

nilliams wrote: post #103
wnevets wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ES2015 just added the class keyword to make it look like java last year. IIRC the new keyword wasn't part of javascript in those first two weeks when javascript was released. Where are you getting this stuff?

'class' wasn't added to make it look like Java. It was added as sugar for a common pattern that everyone was already using. Many languages other than Java have a class keyword.

> Many languages other than Java have a class keyword.

Yes many classical oop languages have the class keyword and that's why javascript added it.

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#107

Post by EdSharkey »

manyoso wrote: post #71
programminggeek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no solution to large scale JS apps. Large systems are inherently problematic. The only way to "fix" them is to break them into smaller modules and subsystems. Fancy abstractions and features will never solve large system issues. The large system issue is that it's large.

This is too clever by half. Some tools/languages are more amenable than others to creating and maintaining large apps. Very large applications have been written and maintained in C/C++ for decades. My contention is that Javascript is particularly ill-suited to the creation and maintenance of large scale apps in the long run for the reasons explained. Any new language which purports to be an improvement upon Javascrip…

JavaScript is a toy language wherein I shake my head in disbelief every day that it is my primary language, but I have found it is possible to write typesafe code with vanilla JavaScript. With tooling and a rigid coding style observed by all developers, I'd say medium-to-large codebases (100K and up) can be maintained and extended just as well as other C-like languages.

Using ultrastrict tools like Google Closure Compiler in conjunction with JSDoc comments gives you type checking along with minification and closure elimination.

If you don't want the harsh taskmaster that Closure Compiler can be, IDE's like IntelliJ are able to navigate (with plugin helpers) your Node.JS codebase and build a useful type library. Again, JSDoc comments are critical here, and if you markup your JavaScript accurately and completely, you wind up with an editor that gives you very good type correctness warnings and inspections. Just keep your eyes peeled for yellow highlights and squiggly lines, and you can have confidence that your codebase is clean. JSDoc is very verbose, which is a shame, and you have to get good at forming types that are conducive to its tags. A good coding style document can go a long way to making that possible.

I've found boring JavaScript groks best for all tooling. I stay away from mixins and mostly stick to boring old JS prototype definitions where the mutable bits are @type'd and assigned in the constructor to 'this'. Chrome can JIT these types of prototypes the best.

Of course, there's no substitute when maintaining a large code base than to run with a comprehensive test suite.

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#108

Post by Kiro »

SimeVidas wrote: post #95
creamyhorror wrote: post #14

I've been following Imba for the past several months since the initial announcement on HN. I like the clean syntax, tags, and high performance, so I hope you guys attract interest despite all the library/framework fatigue we're experiencing in frontend JS land. It's rather refreshing to be able to write code and view all together, like .css(appropriate_styling) It would be great if you had some walked-through example…

I think the HTML standard prohibits you from using non-standard tags like or , unless they have a dash in them.

This can't be true. I use non-standard tags without dashes all the time for my custom directives in Angular.

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#109

Post by ianamartin »

I have a backlog of personal projects of various kinds that I have been tinkering with for years now. But since I'm a back end guy, that's what I normally work on when I have free time.

Every time I decide that I'm going to take the plunge and get down and dirty with front end stuff, I get completely paralyzed by choice, and I end up deciding that the most sensible way for me to move forward is to learn the fundamentals and design front ends with html + CSS + vanilla JavaScript.

As you can imagine, my elegant back-end designs have interfaces the 90s would have deemed tacky.

I really like the syntax (Python guy checking in here), but I don't even know where to start integrating this into a Pyramid app or what to do with it.

I don't even know how to get started here. I have a market research app for building questionnaires. Like SurveyMonkey, but different. I want the front end to be trello-like so that you can move the questions around that way.

I "know" JavaScript pretty well at this point. But when I look at the front end code for an open source trello clone, I swear it's just effing magic. Doesn't even relate in my mind to the language I thought I've been learning all this time.

Since these kinds of threads tend to attract a lot of front end people, I thought I'd ask here: is this an appropriate language for a trello-like interface?

There was a certain point in my career when I was learning Python when I went from knowing how to write classes and functions to being able to know what classes and functions to write to achieve my goals.

I know how to do things in JS, but I have no idea what to do to accomplish my goals.

Any tips from anyone?

Re: Imba: A new programming language for web apps

#110

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

manyoso wrote: post #73
wnevets wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prototypal inheritance isn't a liability that needs to be fixed.

Yes, it is and the first reason is related to #1. Prototypical inheritance doesn't make much sense outside of a dynamic language. The second reason is because Javascript is disguised to look like Java and hence people familiar with the C-family of languages are surprised and baffled because Javascript is using the C-family syntax and idioms for classical inheritance to mask the very different prototypical inheritance…

It could be interesting to have prototypical inheritance with static types if you do immutable objects and structural typing.
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