Show HN: Imba 2.0 – The JavaScript Alternative by Scrimba (YC S20) (opens in new tab)

I'm Sindre, CTO at Scrimba (S20). We're about to launch a _major_ overhaul of Imba, the programming language we use for everything here (both frontend and backend). Imho the best frameworks are the ones that are extracted from real projects trying to solve real problems. Imba is like that, but at a language-level. It has been through countless iterations over the past 7 years, striving to be the perfect language for developing web applications.

We have added tons of cool things like touch modifiers (https://imba.io/events/touch-events), inline styles (https://imba.io/css/syntax), optional types and great tooling that integrates deeply with TypeScript. With this version we feel that we are very close to our vision for what Imba should be. In other words; it is finally ready for public consumption. I'd wholeheartedly advice you to look into it and give it a whirl if you are interested in web development :)

Check out this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XS5q9xhaMc) building a counter in less than 1 minute.

- Compiles to Javascript, works with node + npm

- DOM tags & styles as first-class citizens

- Optional typing and deep TypeScript integration

- Blazing-fast dev/build tools based on esbuild

- Advanced tooling with refactoring++ across js,ts, and imba files

I have seen Imba evolve from v1 to v2, and I am using it in many production apps, small and medium scale. I think it's ready for the spotlight. Come try it out. I go months without creating vanilla html, css, js with imba. And I don't miss it. There is something special about being able to separate or unify concerns of app development by features and not file types (html, css, js) And the minimal syntax, makes development ridiculously fast. It almost feels like playing and prototyping.

Imba is great. I was a fan of Coffeescript and glad to find something with similar syntax, but after using Imba, the syntax is far from my favorite part. It's a replacement for react that is much easier to use (there's no special state management, just use regular variables), and has much less performance problems (seems to render whatever I throw at it without slowing down). The CSS shorthand and added features are hard to stop using once you've learned them.

I'm not aware of a faster way to "express" a working software UI than Imba.

maybe this will give me a final push to try it!