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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

#321
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One piece of feedback: it took me a moment to work out what 'pt', 'o' and 'fs' were. Single character variables are fine for algorithms but for demos you really want to use actual words.

Those shorthands are optional.

Great but they shouldn’t be used in demos.

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

#322
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Thanks, this looks really useful

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

#323
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I've always been kind of confused by the common best practice of separating everything. React and Vue single file components made so much sense to me. I guess if I were to rationalize my position, I'd say it's because I have a hard time finding related things when they're separate. If a button or "a" tag have a special click handler, I want to know when looking at it. If it just has classes, then I don't k…

Personally I think it's not so much about separation of concerns/technologies per se, it's that this debate boils down to a different debate under the hood: the one about folder-by-type vs folder-by-feature[0]. The gist is that folder-by-feature is generally preferrable because it requires less context switching (in the literal sense of jumping between multiple different far away folders and scanning each for the thi…

> You can use folder-by-feature structure alongside with separation of technologies, it's just not that common to see it

Angular is a pretty good example of this. The HTML, CSS, unit tests, and code are all in separate files, but they have the same base name and are grouped together in the same place.

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

#324
post #5

One thing that irks me about Javascript is "const". I think it should have been called "con". "var", "let", "con". So the first thing I did here is look up the docs and see how variables are declared. Aaarghh.. "let" and "const" again :)

Why should there should be a flag word before IDentifier, indeed the answer is.

[constant variable name] = value

is not the right thing?

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I know almost nothing about the subject at hand, so here's my expert opinion on it"

I've been a software developer for 20 years. I've been doing JavaScript since it was invented. I do actually know a lot about these things.

That's not what you said initially. Nice bait

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a software developer for 20 years. I've been doing JavaScript since it was invented. I do actually know a lot about these things.

That's not what you said initially. Nice bait

I didn't say anything about my past experience. Is it so incomprehensible that people did massive amounts of web development before React was even a twinkle in someone's eye? Is it so incomprehensible that someone could learn React and then choose not to continue to use it?

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

#327
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for projects build using imba?

Nothing you should worry about. MIT is a very permissive license.

You have to worry about including the copyright and license in your software. I've never seen a project do that so I'm not sure how to do it or if MIT is actually usable.

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

#328
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you should worry about. MIT is a very permissive license.

You have to worry about including the copyright and license in your software. I've never seen a project do that so I'm not sure how to do it or if MIT is actually usable.

The attribution clause only applies to the licensed code, not derivatives. In practice, all this means is that you can use an unmodified copy of Imba (which contains its own license/attribution language) without issues.

What's not cool is to fork Imba, remove the attribution to the original author and pass it off as your own code.

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

#329
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, it's not an either-or thing. I started my project to scratch an itch and only released it because I thought it could be useful to others. It originally didn't occur to me at all that my side project might influence my own career. But turns out that having a lot of stars on github attracts the attention of recruiters who use bot-based tooling to find talent and hitting HN front page attracts lurker employers. Getting stars is correlated with usefulness, and good docs correlate w/ usefulness as well. There doesn't need to be a direct causation relationship or even any specific intent, all that matters is what actually ends up happening when multiple correlations interplay.

Also, you can write open source software in big tech companies and even be paid to do it (React core team is a good example). TC39 folks spending time moving the Ecmascript standard forward is another example of staff/principal engineers doing citizenship-oriented work in order to get recognition for impact at FANG L6+. Being snarky about it doesn't change the fact that these sorts of symbiosis exist.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what you said initially. Nice bait

I didn't say anything about my past experience. Is it so incomprehensible that people did massive amounts of web development before React was even a twinkle in someone's eye? Is it so incomprehensible that someone could learn React and then choose not to continue to use it?

I actually don't like react. The whole thing reeks of religion.

I do like Vue and Svelte, though. They let me do powerful things without getting in the way.

Native APIs are fine but eventually you're gonna need some more abstractions in order to scale beyond a garage app.

Frankly, I tend to write my own stuff on the backend but there's so much more work on the front end, you end up either adopting or building a framework.

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