

Opa (the programming language) Enters 2012 With Strong Customer Adoption - NSMeta
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/opa-enters-2012-with-strong-customer-adoption-1604487.htm

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treefrog
Apart from it not being ready production-ready, I find the syntax confusing
and overly engineered. Perhaps I'm just dense. However, as a programmer with
5+ years of experience, it feels rather off that I can't look at some of the
Opa code and understand what is happening.

Haskell providers a lower barrier of entry.

That being said, it's different. I wish them the best as the more options
available to a programmer, the better.

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rabble
Posting a press release to hacker news?!? Really? Your own press release?

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kermitthehermit
They're trying to convince people opa isn't a load of trash. Write some code,
tag it with "built for the cloud", say "it's the future / next gen / teh shit
/ extremely awesome / nice / etc" and hope people believe that crap.

After all, they should bet their startup / business on something which is very
new, seems to lack large real world use and testing. Yeah, that's right, weird
looking code mixed with HTML is just the thing I was looking for. Trust an
untested new database system with my data? Sure, I'll do that....reaaallyyyy
soon...NOT.

They've failed to convince me.

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herval
I never imagined myself as a "customer" of a programming language

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greyfade
It's an AGPL runtime with an option for a paid license to make the AGPL go
away.

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kermitthehermit
It's AGPL licensed? That just upped this company's retarded level to maximum.

I saw they raised 1.7 million USD in funding. Who was so stupid to give them
money for this?

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koper
Normally I'd like to try to understand what you have against AGPL (Opa is dual
licence btw.) but given that half of your wording is around words like
"retarded" and "stupid", I'm not sure whether you're really interested in real
discussion?

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kermitthehermit
From previous experience with AGPL licensed libraries and tools, I decided
that it's best to avoid them without exception.

Basically, GPL and LGPL are the only acceptable licenses from the *GPL family
of licenses when building websites. (GPL/LGPL/MIT/BSD for the server side
software, LGPL/MIT/BSD for the JS libraries reaching the browsers)

I don't like the idea of being forced to license the app under the same
license and release it to the public under AGPL if it's web based or running
on the network.

I've come across such a company which demanded about 300 USD for a javascript
library. Of course, we were told of this generous pricing via email. We rolled
our own. That's when I started to hate AGPL with a passion and to dislike
companies which use it.

Therefore, you can say that I don't want AGPL anywhere near any of the
websites I'll work on or I'm currently working on and that I doubt that the
companies which use this license have a good business model.

Opa has got weird looking syntax which can only lead to even nastier code. It
also has HTML mixed with that weird looking syntax. The database is also
something proprietary and weird. Normally, I can easily read code in a
language I'm not used to. However, this was particularly bad.

All of those apps they show on the website are toy examples. Nothing big or
popular was built with it. This makes me believe it's extremely difficult to
get something done in this language and with the tools of opa.

Do you need to fix an issue? Perhaps add a new feature? I am ok with giving
back changes. Since it's all written in (o)caml, it's more difficult to do
that.

As for the part regarding the money they received, the people who gave them
that amount of money are having a problem noticing how bad this opa language
is. To me, it looks like they wanted to "gamble at this table" as well, just
in case it turned out to be something more than a flop.

The things I'd give another chance somewhere else are: keeping the database &
everything else in a single binary and some of its distributed architecture.

P.S.: I prefer to donate money to open source projects, rather than buy
software to be used in the code of the sites / apps I work on.

~~~
hbbio
So what's your favorite approach for web app development?

