Rubylike Frontend [video] | Hacker News Reader

Rubylike Frontend [video]

pivorak.com

64 pointsmadmaniak19 comments

To save everyone time here is the programming language he is showcasing: http://imba.io.

thanks ️

The huge part of presentation is about mistakes of React - if you already know about it go on and safe your time. Unfortunately original title was censored.

We did something similar a few years ago got quite far with it, also built on React with a custom syntax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHTYHm6qLFY

I don't see a custom language ever breaking into the mainstream unfortunately. You just can't resist an entire ecosystem when the ecosystem is making good moves as a whole. Typescript is a revolution, the dev experience is really good. There are some promising bundlers like Parcel/Pundle that combined with some more mature HMR solutions will really push things forward too.

I'm much more excited on the IDE side now. I think VSCode will start to push really powerful updates and that will really make a huge difference day to day for many developers.

The other big thing that needs to improve is out of the box is databases. Something easy to deploy, with shared models between front/backend and that scales. Even a great layer over SQL. We have Firebase, but it's unfortunate Rethink and Parse went away. Pouch is languishing. Mongo seems to have something new but it's hosted only (?).

Clojure/Clojurescript is an interesting ecosystem in these regards. You get your shared models and lisps are pretty good at being their own form of custom syntax. It's a pleasant ecosystem with really good tooling support

+1 clojure/closurescript are both very nice.

I’m curious why Imba must be a compile-to-JavaScript language rather than a Babel transform along the lines of JSX.

This detail matters because it’s much easier and lower risk for a team to add a Babel preset than to learn a new language.

The intention of Imba is to be a new language, you can't use a new language without learning a new language.

I do appreciate people in the community thinking about how we can get to a more enjoyable developer experience. JS development is full of quirks and complexity that other parts of the web stack aren't burdened with. Many great developers come to JS and feel frustrated with the language and all the work-arounds that JS devs take for granted. Whenever I work on the Rails server-side of a project I yearn for the simplicity and elegance when I go back to the front end. That said, Java makes my brain hurt, so maybe I just gel with Rails really well.

Maybe because it's older than Babel.

Funny, I worked under the speaker when I was employed as a Ruby coder for my first job. We were a two-man team. I wish he'd gone deeper with this presentation. Imba looks quite fun but it doesn't seem to have enough going for it to compete with something like Vue.js

>passing props to root component is data layer

No it is not data. We pass props to components, just like you pass variables to print function in C. printf("Hello %var", var)

Too bad people like to name props: {props.data} thus confusing others.

Props are definitely a data you want to display somewhere in your component. If you need to pass it all the way through, you create a whole unnecessary structure inside of another layer.

Like I said in the video, it's direct implication of how Virtual DOM works. Normally you wouldn't do that.

It's really hard to understand any criticisms you mount against React in the beginning of the presentation, other than the DOM is not slow. Would rather have seen this as a blog post instead. I find Imba appealing, but this talk is far from "React is a big mistake, I explain you gently"

You have whole chain of implications showed in presentation which all together makes a big mistake. If you made a small mistake thinking DOM is slow and you build whole technology on top of it making more small mistakes on your way and it affects the way everyone codes now, isn't it a big mistake after all?

The name of the talk is "Rubylike Frontend" - that's one hell of a clickbait title.

I think your username could also be called a clickbait username ;-)

On the internet, no one knows you're a rodent!

Yes, thanks. A moderator updated the title from “React is a huge mistake. Gently explained” a while ago.

What a clickbait title, the actual video has a totally different one. Please fix.

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