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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

#91
I read this and still have no idea what the ‘memoized DOM’ is. There is a broken link to ‘how it really works’. Apparently there is a huge speed-up over react. I don’t actually care about this; I’d rather know what the slow parts of browser DOM changes are, and how it gets around them.

Forgive my ignorance if I’m missing something obvious; I am completely new to JavaScript, but so far have found react/vue/etc confusing, outdated, and unnecessary for my performance needs, versus going raw with the latest features. It sounds like I might be missing something that could hurt me down the line. Thanks.

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

#92
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this? "const" seems clearer to me. "con" seems very open to misinterpretation: could mean many things. Are there any advantages to "con" over "const"?

My guess is the OP dislikes the difference in keyword length.

I just always use let because it looks better. Const provides pretty much no value in js anyway.

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

#93
post #74

I’m sick of programming languages that use “fast typing” and “productiveness” as a selling point. There’s no selling point in being productive doing a counter in a few seconds, production scenarios are far more complex and very often all those new programming languages fall short to their promise. Btw I don’t want to be fast or productive, I want to write code that works decently and is great for other humans myself…

You could be doing stuff that works decently, is great for humans, and still be productive (maybe even fast). Or figure out how to do it faster next time.

Someone else may want you to be fast and productive. Or... they'll find someone else who can provide what they want who is faster and more productive than you.

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

#95

Congrats How do you make money out of it? Are you working full time on this? Why YC funded this, could you tell me opportunity here?

As far as I understand it, the language came first and in order to teach it to others the founder created a screencasting tool of sorts, which became a company in its own right: https://scrimba.com

Ironically, it seems the company focused on content to teach primarily other technologies while using Imba to build it all. It's a rather fascinating story actually, which I'm paraphrasing and probably mostly got wrong, but if you're interested you can read more on their hiring page: https://scrimba.recruitee.com

N.B.: I'm not in any way affiliated with Imba or Scrimba. The first time I heard of the technology and the company was today, through HN, so I have no skin in this game. I'm probably also mostly wrong about everything above, so you know..

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

#97
post #92
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is the OP dislikes the difference in keyword length.

I just always use let because it looks better. Const provides pretty much no value in js anyway.

It is useful for code readability. When you’re skimming and trying to understand a large chunk of code, if almost all the variables are declared with “const” and then you come across a “let”, you immediately know to look for where it will be mutated elsewhere.

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

#98
post #94

I don't get that push to put so much logic in the frontend. Connections are getting faster and if we load only smaller amounts of data in each request we can have a really great experience without the hassle of all this complexity.

A couple reasons I can think of: - The less logic you do on the client means more data required to be sent over the wire. - Connections are getting faster but we aren't at the point where they're negligible.

For example, if I need to do complex form validation in real time I could send the form value to the backend, have it validate, and receive a response which introduces a lot potential of failure points. Alternatively I could write some logic on the frontend to validate, and this problem expands as the amount of fields in your form increases.

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

#100
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 :)

I've thought about this a lot. I considered "con" for constants. I don't hate it. It also works as a double entendre-- "con" in Spanish means "with". So the following code could be read as "with name equal to Brad". con name = 'Brad' I can't help but feel that it's somewhat jarring though. If I had my druthers, I think I would choose "var" and "def" to declare mutable and immutable variables, respectively. def PI = 3…

> It also works as a double entendre-- "con" in Spanish means "with".

Triple even! In French it's the equivalent of "cunt".

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