Lunascript, another language for writing great web apps

I respect the ambition, but doesn't it seem like a waste of time and money for a brand new startup to focus on the creation of a brand new language (+compiler +debugging facilities +documentation for new employees +libraries +...) before making the core product? I understand the argument that better languages = increased productivity. But designing a new language is a serious investment, and unless what they've made is so revolutionary that it completely changes the web development paradigm, it doesn't seem as if it would pay off.

I'm interested in <i>exactly</i> the sort of application framework they seem to be talking about. This is really how web apps (or all apps) should be built.<p>The Wikipedia link isn't terribly informative, but there's a ton of more relevant literature tied in with functional reactive programming. (That's the FRP in their to-do list). In particular, there's a research project called Flapjax that you can play with right now that drives home how nice it <i>could</i> be to program in this paradigm.<p>I have two worries about Luna, though. It doesn't look like they're using a nice type system, which will be a pain for larger apps. And I can't say I like that "Finish patent documentation for incremental computing framework" to-do item.

I interviewed with Asana back in October and I got to see an in-person demo of the app Justin shows at the 1:45 mark, a "structured list editor" that he says they use internally to track bugs and projects. It's not just a hello world app they built to test the language, it's a real app they use daily and fast fast <i>fast</i>. After poking around on it with only keyboard shortcuts while discussing UI ideas for a few minutes, I completely forget that it was a web app. It didn't have any of gmail's or google reader's lag, for example, which are the only apps with keyboard shortcuts I use regularly.

This language looks pretty awesome, reading the example code I can see how it would slash my loc for ajaxy stuff by at least an order of magnitude.<p>However, I am confused about this announcement since I cannot discover what your company does from the web page and except the video there's not much to go on about the language. Perhaps you want to fill in some blanks in the comment section?

&#62; There's no need to write separate code to help the server figure out which values need to be sent to the client: the server can do this by simulating the UI.<p>Interesting approach.<p>The screencast is very good.<p>Wonder if that 1500 line todo list app is part of Asana?

It seems like writing a whole new language is a bit overkill... why not simply stick to the framework layer?

Isn't this somewhat equivalent to flapjax[1]?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.flapjax-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flapjax-lang.org/</a>

Andrew Warner should interview these guys immediately.