The Opa Programming Language

Welcome to the Opa page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

This article was written by:

• Jeremy Grifski
• Ron Zuckerman

Description

Opa is sadly a short-lived language, created in 2011 by the company MLState. It's strongly focused on webapps, as it lets you write server-side and client-side code, side by side. The client-code is compiled into JavaScript, and the server-code, into Node.js. All using strong, static typing. Pretty nifty.

In version 0.9.0, it natively supported MongoDB, as if it had an ORM built in. In 1.1.0, this support was extended to PostgreSQL too.

It reminds me a bit of React/JSX, as it's wholeheartedly designed for interoperability with HTML. It's actually a first-class citizen. Blurring the line between client and server code is something that I'm really fond of.

The problem is that, having had only 2 years of activity, the "user experience" is really bad. Setting up the environment is… problematic, to say the least. It requires installing Node.js and OCaml, with dependencies of each one sprinkled in. Which in turn need dependencies. Some of which have to be compiled from source. In a time where installing a language (or anything really) should not take more than 2 or 3 commands (apt update && apt install -y Stuff-0.1.1-dev), this was a paaaain!!

Luckily, there's this cute technology called containers.

Articles

• Hello World in Opa