Ask HN: Uncommon Web Languages?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33508014

by ilrwbwrkhv • 4 years ago

17 20 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Recently I have been a huge fan of

1. Imba (https://imba.io/) 2. Mint Lang (https://mint-lang.com/)

and have been quite impressed.

Are there any other languages like these for the web which takes uncommon approaches and tries to make things faster, easier?

Elm is another which I know about and have played with.

treeface9000• 4 years ago

Already mentioned in original post... but because I love it +1 on Elm

x86hacker1010• 4 years ago

Clojurescript

solardev• 4 years ago

These days... Angular

megraf• 4 years ago

CGI.pm

phyrex• 4 years ago

Hacklang

mattl• 4 years ago

WebScript? ColdFusion?

decide1000• 4 years ago

ColdFusion! Wild. I wrote tons of code in CF over 10 years ago. I was not aware it is still a thing.

pull_my_finger• 4 years ago

Haxe Lang has some really nice UI frameworks including HaxeUI[1] and CoconutUI[2] which can both compile for the web using the javascript target. You get AOT type checking + compile-time macros. Haxe, I think, had the poor luck of coming about in the same general time as TypeScript which had a mega corporation propelling its hype and adoption.

[1] https://github.com/haxeui/haxeui-core

[2] https://github.com/MVCoconut/coconut.ui

hyuuu• 4 years ago

i am always rooting for haxe it's just the community adoption is so lacking, which i find surprising. At the time, typing was somewhat shun by the javascript community until the arrival of Flow/Typescript, but Haxe had already existed way before those and with additional benefits of compiling to other languages. One day, I hope haxe will find its rightful place outside of game development.

_448• 4 years ago

UrWeb: https://github.com/urweb/urweb

bitwize• 4 years ago

Do people still use Morfik anymore?

aarpmcgee• 4 years ago

Tons of them, but I am most interested in the following for various reasons:

PureScript[1] — been around a long time. Looks a lot like Haskell to me.

Derw[2] — Elm-like, interesting integration with Typescript

Amber[3] — smalltalk for js

Rescript[4] — its been awhile since i last looked at this project (during a catastrophic rebrand) so I'm not sure where this project is at, but it did seem very promising to me at one point.

[1] https://www.purescript.org/

[2] https://github.com/eeue56/derw

[3] https://amber-lang.net/

[4] https://rescript-lang.org/

andyzweb• 4 years ago

P-star https://www.p-star.org/

halfmatthalfcat• 4 years ago

Scala.js

quechimba• 4 years ago

I'm making a VDOM framework in Ruby. It runs on the server and streams DOM patches to the browser. Components are written in Haml and stylesheets are scoped to components. There is hot reloading too.

I haven't made any public releases yet and I'm not sure if the project is mature enough to receive any attention so I'm not posting a link at this point

Example of a simple component:

    %div Hello

State and callbacks:

    :ruby
      Button = import("./Button")

      def self.get_initial_state(initial_count: 0, **props) = {
        count: 0
      }

      def handle_click(event)
        update do |state|
          { count: state[:count] + 1 }
        end
      end
    %div
      %p
        Count: #{state[:count]}
      %Button(onclick=handle_click)
        Increment

And it's async so if you want to make a component that shows the current time:

    :ruby
      def mount
        loop do
          update(time: Time.now.to_s)
          sleep 0.5
        end
      end
    %p Current time: #{state[:time]}

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

Looks super cool.

evnix• 4 years ago

similar to livewire in PHP/Laravel and Phoenix liveview, We definitely need more of these as it makes absolutely no sense to bring in the JS bloat for a few forms and drawing a few rectangles and this is 99% of the web apps out there.

mycall• 4 years ago

C++ the O.G.

mhd• 4 years ago

Smalltalk and it’s Seaside server were really something in the early days. Basically broke out of the response/request model by doing your interactions with saved continuations. So if your server function requests a text to be entered, it would be “frozen” there and once the date makes it’s way back, it’ll pick up right there. Obviously that takes some RAM, and coupled with the unusual language, that made it a rare beast. Of course, later we’d escape this interaction model in much worse and wasteful ways, but now it’s the client paying for the RAM.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Also a very big Mint fan. Discovered it thanks to a long post from the Elm founder.

Conceptually very nice. It is like you take React practicality, Ruby on Rails joy and a decent (but not full!) dose of Elm purity and correctness. I am porting a hobby project over to it right now, and then hopefully build more with it, and then eventually maybe contribute.

I also really like Elm, but the problem I have with it is needing all state updates to be centralized, and the kind of coding patterns that leads to. Some people like this, but I prefer the more React-like looseness where objects can have their own private state and so on. Even if that means I give up time travel debugging and so on.

Another uncommonish one is Elixir/Phoenix. I was going to learn this but it felt like 'work' to learn, whereas Mint didn't. And that is mostly to do with how my brain works. I think also Mint optimizes for joy for small projects, whereas Phoenix will come into it's own when you need to scale up, and it is easy to do so, in my opinion.

Since Firebase (or it's competition) can give me live updates, I don't feel I really "need" to learn Phoenix for any use case I will get into.

Ask HN: Uncommon Web Languages?

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