31–40 of 88 posts
For long time I was planning to develop a similar language, I'm happy that they did it. Probably they did some things differently than I imagined, but abstracting away the client-server communication is a good thing. For those complaining that it's not MVC - you can build a MVC framework on top of it.
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.
The tour page above is fubared for me on Opera Mobile 12. The right pane won't scroll and is obscured by a large semi-opaque overlay.
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.
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.
Hope they do the same as meteor... They were dual license, one GPL, one commercial. But a lot of people rejected to use it. So they changed to MIT.
I lost fate on Opa when they decided to drop OCaml and jump on the JavaScript bandwagon.
The 'one unified language' therefore just refers to using a single language on client and server, and as it happens it's a JavaScript like language, so simply in terms of languages used it's not all that different to using JS on the client and server.
The main selling point of this appears to be strong static typing.
Edit: Also yes, glad they are rethinking the licensing.
Looks quite similar to Curl ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curl_(programming_language) ), although Curl only runs on the client and needs a plugin. It got a lot of press ten years ago but is now mostly forgotten. Opa runs on the client and server and compiles to JS, so it got that advantage over Curl. But it's still a kitchen sink wrapper around existing technology, from a single vendor. Those seem to never work out…
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent=0.5in,
{text color = "red", font-size = 12pt,
I actually learned and coded some CURL, 10 years ago}
{text color = "green", font-size = 12pt,
Said that, I'm happy it is gone, it made my dev live much more complicated instead of easier}}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.
I think comparing to complex combinations of ' and "" is a bit of a straw man, as JavaScript developers use templating languages like Handlebars/Mustache so that really isn't an issue!
I see why you're doing it the way you are for the static HTML checking though!