Opa: new web dev stack

Nulty

Just found out about this now although I'm not really qualified to comment or critique. Has any one used it or know anything about it?

http://opalang.org/

boblong

Looks interesting enough, although I personally prefer a separation of concerns. I've used nodejs which also aims to remove the context switch (ie. moving from one language to another and back again etc.) involved in web development, but allows me to structure large projects the way I like (MVC).

Although I could be convinced

stevenmu

Looks interesting, the concept seems to be a 4GL type of platform, designed specifically for the web/cloud.

I used Progress 4GL / OpenEdge for a few years, and in many ways it's an excellent environment. It allows for relatively complex data based applications to be put together in incredibly short amounts of time. The problem comes when you want a finer level of control, or to just do something totally new and different.

I tend to think of development as being a little like building stuff with lego, it's really just taking the different building blocks you have and arranging them the right way to get the desired result. With a 4GL you get a couple of types of big blocks, if you want to just build a big wall, you can do it very quickly by sticking them together, but if you want to change the shape of the wall a little, or change it's colour, you're screwed. With a 3GL you get lots of types of little blocks, it takes a bit longer to put them all together to build a big wall, but you can build the wall almost exactly the way you want, and it's much easier to create new block types when needed too.

I suspect this Opa will fall into the same trap to some degree, although because it's aimed at the web they could include mechanisms to allow fine-grained control over HTML/Javascript/CSS which could offset that a lot.