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Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

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Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#311
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing, I really like projects like this. And the website is really informative. I find it less of a new language and more of a JS preprocessor, removing lots of the cruft and integrating XML-tags and CSS in a very neat way. What I miss: 1) I feel the web is shifting to more type checking. TS, Elm, Kotlin.js... I personally also prefer more typesafety, especially if the project grows in LOC/team size. 2)…

If you want something like that, check out Mint (www.mint-lang.com) :)

Interesting. Does not tick all the boxes, but certainly interesting and, imho, very similar to Imba but with a bit more typing.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#313
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine if you have a few colors, but with 50+ lines of SASS/component I'd rather have them separately. > I have a hard time finding related things when they're separate. Store them in the same directory? I agree on the events/business logic that they make sense to couple with the template code.

And have to switch between three files back and forth?

Or up and down in one file.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#314
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I consult their docs, I feel like I have less of a handle on the topic than when I started.

I think this might be partly due to the query language being JSON? It makes every example huge and hard to understand. JSON is a serialization format that's human-readable, it's not a human-first language. So it's a pity that's how you're expected to write searches (I know they have some SQL support now, but I've never seen it in the docs)

I don't think this has anything to do with json or examples in general. At least not for me.

Quite often after reading their doc I just don't understand what result I should expect. Also the whole documentation simply lacks sane navigation. It's almost impossible to find anything there without google.

In 50% of cases this is how it works for me (exaggerated):

Question: how do I sum two integers?

Expected Answer: You should use SUM(). The result of the function is the sum of two integers. Examples:

2 + 2 = 4

2 + (-2) = 0

-1 + (-1) = -2

Answer from Elastic docs: Well, you should execute this query agains this API, which will launch X subroutines in Elastic engine and the final result will be the result of of the aggregation of function defined by the Ex with En+1 being your query's body field Y with respect to url query param N.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I consult their docs, I feel like I have less of a handle on the topic than when I started.

Hate to pile on, but I'm glad it's not just me. When I read their docs, I just get the feeling that I'm kind of dumb, or I just don't have the context they expect me to have.

This. It almost like their docs is a cheat sheet for the Elastic devs, not for the end users.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#316
post #227

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Any extra salary? No of course not. Lol.

Anecdata, but after I released Mithril.js, I started getting contacted by recruiters from Bay Area companies. I now make 4 times as much as I did when I first started working on it. I know of other folks that got poached by high tech companies due to growing prominence in open source. FWIW, my experience reflects GP that people really appreciate someone who takes the time to teach/help others. YMMV.

And it's very well deserved, Mithril is amazing!

I never had a really successful OSS project but I have a few friends who had or were maintainers of successful projects.

One got poached by FB, another one is a contractor at a higher than average rate.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#317
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding types, you're right, though JSDoc can get you very far Regarding perf (performance, I guess?) - are you speaking of the single, global one? As CS takes care of variable scoping automatically, I think it makes a lot of sense (and is deactivatable anyway)

> JSDoc can get you very far in the sense that you write them and parse them in your brain manually. JSDoc is useful to me because IDE supports it for javascript. Without IDE support it's just a bunch of fancy comments

You could try using the https://github.com/phil294/coffeesense/ VSCode extension for that, released 7 days ago (disclaimer: I made it).

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#318
Looks neat and the website is simply awesome.

I personally wouldn't use it.

I'd rather go for something closer to JS or for something closer to FP like elm (if only they didn't have that dictatorship fixation issue).

I would recommend investing in fast and safe tooling. After years of typescript I switched to swc (written in rust) and the difference in productivity is night and day. No more OOMs, much faster, no more hanging processes with vscode.

Best of luck!

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#319
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any extra salary? No of course not. Lol.

Anecdata, but after I released Mithril.js, I started getting contacted by recruiters from Bay Area companies. I now make 4 times as much as I did when I first started working on it. I know of other folks that got poached by high tech companies due to growing prominence in open source. FWIW, my experience reflects GP that people really appreciate someone who takes the time to teach/help others. YMMV.

Working on OSS and working for high tech companies are two things that are diametrically opposite. The latter is not a reward for the former, unless you were only ever writing OSS to pad your resume.

Re: Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a Coffeescript Renaissance!

World needs a version of coffeescript that compiles to typescript.

(being discussed here https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/issues/5307)
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