Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language. • Hacker News Board

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#11

Post by ma2rten » Sat, May 05, 2012, 8:25 AM UTC

chc wrote: post #10

wavephorm wrote: post #8

It's a herculean effort. I heard about Opa about a year or two ago, amazed he's still at it. Kind of like Haxe. I doubt they will go anywhere, like Coffescript, because any language that simply abstracts another is just cruft and doomed to be obsoleted.

By that logic, Ruby and Python are just as doomed because they're ultimately just elaborate abstractions on top of C (or at least their reference implementations are). The implementation language and output target of a programming language are not material to the language itself. C targets a wide array of machine codes, but you'd be remiss in saying it's "just an abstraction on top of x86," and thus doomed to fail. L…

I would go so far to say that any programming language is an abstraction over another language and/or hardware instructions. Also any API is an abstraction over another API and/or hardware instructions.

EDIT: I realized that technically my first statement is not correct: Any Turing complete language can be language can be compiled to any other Turning complete programming language. So it not an abstraction, but equivalent.

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#12

Post by candeira » Sat, May 05, 2012, 8:41 AM UTC

I don't see how it replaces HTML. At most it manages HTML.

Also a question: can anybody knowledgeable tell us how Opa compares with Meteor? Both of them seem to follow the approach that any piece of code can run in either the server or the client, either with the system choosing automagically or with the code specifying a 'server' or 'client' directive.

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#13

Post by gosub » Sat, May 05, 2012, 8:41 AM UTC

    Opa however extends the classical syntax with advanced features specific to the web.
    HTML fragments can be inserted directly without quotes:

    line = bar;

I'm not sure that this helps readability, feels like reverse php (html inside code, vs code inside html).

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#14

Post by cedrics » Sat, May 05, 2012, 8:58 AM UTC

candeira wrote: post #12

I don't see how it replaces HTML. At most it manages HTML. Also a question: can anybody knowledgeable tell us how Opa compares with Meteor? Both of them seem to follow the approach that any piece of code can run in either the server or the client, either with the system choosing automagically or with the code specifying a 'server' or 'client' directive.

You are probably referring to this article http://blog.opalang.org/2012/04/one-web-app-one-language.htm... "[Opa] automatically determine where the code should run..."

And some previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858838

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#15

Post by chubot » Sat, May 05, 2012, 9:06 AM UTC

wavephorm wrote: post #8

It's a herculean effort. I heard about Opa about a year or two ago, amazed he's still at it. Kind of like Haxe. I doubt they will go anywhere, like Coffescript, because any language that simply abstracts another is just cruft and doomed to be obsoleted.

Agreed, the law of leaky abstractions is pretty brutal. When you're writing serious systems you always have to peek under the hood -- e.g. you have to reason about data structure sizes in the JVM, or check out the code that GCC outputs, or look at the Python interpreter source code. Having a bunch of monolithic magic with its own world view sitting between you and the machine is a big barrier.

I'm skeptical of anything that tries to present a grand unified model. GWT is another example of where this strategy fails IMO.

As noted below, CoffeeScript is a different case that illustrates the point. It seems moderately successful (I haven't used it) precisely because it's a such a modest abstraction. It aims to be a 1-to-1 with JavaScript, and keeps the semantics of JavaScript, rather than imposing its own semantics which are inevitably at odds with what browsers/servers are really doing.

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#16

Post by hbbio » Sat, May 05, 2012, 9:27 AM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #7

Opa is neat, but the two license options of AGPL or "talk to us for a price" basically ensure it will never achieve anything close to mainstream usage.

Thanks for your comment. You raise insightful questions and we are aware that our current licensing must change. Expect to read about this soon!

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#17

Post by hbbio » Sat, May 05, 2012, 9:29 AM UTC

gosub wrote: post #13

Opa however extends the classical syntax with advanced features specific to the web. HTML fragments can be inserted directly without quotes: line = bar ; I'm not sure that this helps readability, feels like reverse php (html inside code, vs code inside html).

It's much more readable than complex combinations of " and '. Furthermore, with the static typing, all your structures are checked at compile time: Try it, you'll see how helpful it is.

Re: Opa replaces Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL with one unified language.

#18

Post by pygorex » Sat, May 05, 2012, 10:16 AM UTC

Christ on a cracker. Web browsers don't understand Opa. They understand HTML. They understand CSS. They understand JavaScript.

Who do you want on your team? Someone who understands Opa? Or someone who knows what browsers know, in detail?

If I know only Opa I'm limited to what the Opa developers know about these technologies. I'm limited by what they know. By mastering these technologies I'm only limited by what I can imagine.

Opa is a barrier on my imagination.