imba VS coffeescript

Imba. The best web programming language ever made.

https://imba.io/

I agree. I was looking for the same thing.

They’re not easy to create but side by side code/result demos like the ones I saw on https://imba.io/ make it very clear on what I’ll be getting into as a developer.

You might get away with Svelte (not Sveltekit) here since it compiles down to javascript. Another fun framework to try out for this might be https://imba.io/, which also has an option to compile things down to pure HTML, CSS & JS (plus it’s very fun to work with).

I've been using Svelte exclusively for the past 3 years or so. I love it and will keep using it as my main solution for interactivity. It's fast to use and execute, produces small apps, and it's extremely economical in how you express components.

The confusion the author expresses with $: reactive statements and store auto subscription with the $ are unwarranted IMO. It's really just a lack of familiarity but this kind of stuff becomes intuitive very quickly.

My criticism of Svelte is rather that they haven't gone deep enough into the compiler-based approach.

Would be great if there were something like .svelteStore files where you had all the automatic reactivity tracking without having to use a component. Or some kind of improvements into writing styles. With a compiler you can do anything you want and I think Svelte has been a bit timid, maybe to not scare people away.

For example Imba[1] also bet on a compiler-based approach (years before Svelte existed) and created their own language/framework/compiler. They have come up with amazing solutions to many problems. It's a shame they bet on Ruby aesthetics though and also that they aren't investing into marketing/docs.

Of course, one might argue that using a compiler is a bad idea for a number of reasons. And yeah of course there are objective issues to any approach, but you have to pick your poison. All in all, Svelte has made me tremendously productive compared to using other solutions for years (React, Vue, Mithril, Inferno, etc).

I will say though that I would rather use a solution that doesn't have any reactivity at all. Mithril and Imba have this concept of just "redrawing the whole thing" like a game GUI without having to worry about reactivity. Cognitively speaking, no reactivity is the best mental model IMO. With any reactive solution, it's very easy to fall into complex reactive dependencies which can be hard to track. The author of Imba has a video from 2018 where he talks about this[2].

[1] https://imba.io/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwoApTLvRdQ

A code snippet showing a simple program right on the home page and "selling" whatever features makes it special would go a long way. It's quite off-putting to have to delve deep into a guide in order to get a feel for a language.

Some examples done right:

https://lfe.io

https://elixir-lang.org

https://imba.io

https://ocaml.org

At the same time, my heart is kind of in the web stuff and I find it a lot more exciting personally so it's hard for me to leave. You can do so much more with web tech and all the new ideas Tcoming from it and the pace it's developing is really . I just don't understand why React is becoming the standard when it's a complete nightmare compared to where we should be. I mean, this is literally insane, especially when things like Svelte exist - or even better, Imba. The day Imba becomes the standard is the day I love web dev again.

That said, there are ways to embrace the JS ecosystem without actually using JavaScript. Many popular languages have transpilers that will convert code written in that particular language into something that will run natively in a web browser (in other words, JavaScript). Even TypeScript is a language that gets transpiled into JavaScript, so it's not that outrageous of a concept, it just gets more difficult to do the further you get away from languages that don't already look like JavaScript.

As a front-end web developer, do you still use CoffeeScript or jQuery? Unlikely, as TypeScript, ES/TC39 and Babel (and the retirement of Internet Explorer thanks to @codepo8 and his EDGE team) have helped to transform JavaScript into some kind of a modern programming language.

CoffeeScript

On the other hand, companies choose React because that's where all the developers are. If you want to build something that can be maintained years from now, you better not choose the next hype train that goes straight to nowhere (remember CoffeeScript ?). You want something battle tested that has stood the test of time, where you won't have trouble finding developers to scale once you need to. And nobody ever got fired for choosing React.