Comment by PufPufPuf
1 day ago
Definitely Opa: http://opalang.org/
In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then.
I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will build web apps 14 years later.
This is so cool
Wow, why didnt this take off?
My best guess is:
- not backed by a huge corporation (React = FB, TypeScript = Microsoft, Next.js = Vercel, ...)
- many of the ideas I listed above were controversial at the time of introduction, I can imagine that Opa must have felt overwhelming
- Opa didn't actually have components or state management, which was a pain point on which React originally took off