imba VS npmgraph

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.

This looks a lot better than I expected.

One thing that bugs me about this (and Tailwind) is the number of dependencies they pull in. Panda has 152 nodes (239, if you count their dev-dependencies)[0].

Tailwind has 98 (594 if you count their dev-dependencies).

I know they're only dev-dependencies, but still... I've got all of that code running on my machine, just to process CSS. I really don't love it.

[0] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=%40pandacss%2Fdev

This is what I came up with. I get 514. I got 496 here https://npmgraph.js.org/. I'm curious what you get using npm and/or yarn, or other tool.

For a real-world example, check out my npmgraph.js.org tool. It crawls a module's dependency tree on the fly, fetching the NPM registry info for each module. For a large dependency graph like the one for gatsby, on my 60 mbps connection the client completes 1,200+ requests (120MB of data) in about 10 seconds.

Why Array.isArray() when you can require("is-array").isArray()?

deep-equal has 43 packages that are mostly has-*, is-* packages (https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=deep-equal) and you’ll find this package included in a lot of upstream libraries.

The great irony of this post is that the author dreams of a world where they can use a library without it depending on hundreds of other modules, yet their website is built on Gatsby, an NPM package with one of the most insane dependency graphs I've seen. Uploading the author's website's package.json[1] into npmgraph[2] lists a total of 1561 dependencies. All that for what amounts to a simple blog site.

[1] https://github.com/poeti8/pouria.dev/blob/master/package.jso...

[2] https://npmgraph.js.org/

You can actually graph the horrible depencency tree of any package you want here: https://npmgraph.js.org/

> Postgres.js is also a zero dependency module, whereas Slonik has quite the dependency graph meaning - compare https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=slonik with https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=postgres.

This one just made my day. Thanks. I remember trying to build a tool at work with as little as possible dependencies (in python) and how satisfying it was to see quite a few dependencies just being wrappers replaces with 5 lines of my own code that i could easily audit and ensure no supply chain attack was possible for that functionality.

Dependency graph. The more dependencies a framework has, the larger the attack surface area. It can also make debugging issues in your applications much more difficult. You don’t need to find a framework with zero dependencies, but you should have some awareness of a framework’s dependency graph. The tool npmgraph can provide you with an excellent overview.

Recognize when you're the person holding the project back: This has happened to me a couple times now. When your interest in a project wanes, be deliberate about recognizing that. Focus what little energy you do have on recruiting people to help out (or even take over).