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

opalang.org

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

#61

Post by jebblue »

nilliams wrote: post #38

If you look at the docs you'll see it's not trying to replace CSS and HTML (thankfully). CSS and HTML are still used. There just appears to be some extra sugar around HTML templating (and it checks your HTML at compile-time). 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…

If we go to one language, I'd prefer to take the GWT approach which uses Java on the client and the server.

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

#62

Post by bokchoi »

scarmig wrote: post #60
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).

Reminds me of XML literals in .NET.

Or JavaScript E4X

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

#63

Post by Egregore »

wavephorm wrote: post #41
tluyben2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This 'but we wanna make millions with a dual license as that 0.000001% of open source products do' attitude is definitely the largest barrier for this. And it's incredibly short sighted; just open up (L)GPL and do services + support. All big companies WILL buy support as that's what they do. AGPL is crap and will stop your growth; you have an uphill battle already, so don't do stupid things like that.

All big companies WILL buy support as that's what they do. No they won't. MIT license lets them use the software for free. Why woukd anyone pay anything if it can be used freely?

Vaadin is on apache license and still makes money on support.

https://vaadin.com/license

https://vaadin.com/pro

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

#64

Post by chubot »

lihaoyi wrote: post #55
chubot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anythi…

We've heard this all before, though. 40 years ago, Machine Code was where it was it, and people scoffed at those who were lazy enough to use an assembler. Then Assembly was where it was at, and the abstraction that C provided was leaky and poor, and compiled code could never be as good as hand-written assembly coded directly against the individual processor instruction set. The problem with this argument is that it a…

It doesn't -- C is analogous to the coffeescript case; it's not at all like Opa. It's the minimal portable abstraction over digital computers. Given some C code, it's not hard to predict roughly what instructions it compiles into. It precisely illustrates the point, because there were dozens of more complicated abstractions (languages) that failed. They claimed to do more for you, but what they did conflicted with reality and failed (in that era, usually because it was hard to reason about performance). C is humble and makes few assumptions.

"Abstraction is layering ignorance on top of reality" -- Richard Gabriel

My opinion is that anything which tries to abstract network communication and make it "transparent" is going to run in to problems at scale. For some reason there is this endless desire of programmers to extend their type system across the wire. It's been tried so many times.

The goal of Opa appears to be "transparency" as discussed here -- making distributed computing look like single-machine computing. This was also the goal of GWT.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=700969849916494972...

Also related:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=170119098329023261...

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

#66

Post by jrockway »

lmm wrote: post #26
pygorex wrote: post #18

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…

Computers don't understand HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript. They only understand opcodes.

Opcodes!? Real programmers carefully etch silicon into a shape that exploits the various physical properties of flowing electrons to perform computations. Logic gates and opcodes are just an ultra-high-level lossy abstraction above this. Kids today...

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

#70

Post by joe_the_user »

When I looked for sample code, it automatically transfered me to the tour, which then failed to load.

Anyway, the language seems to support all the constructs of the languages it claims to replace - which could easily mean it would be even more confusing than using those languages.

Also, I think Cold Fusion is an effort to do a similar thing and has about fifteen years of history. Railo seems to be an open source clone of CFML: http://www.getrailo.org/

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