[noahtallen]

Frankly, if you're just writing a local CLI tool with Node, it's not really an issue. Most of the build tool features listed in the article aren't needed for a local JS runtime. Node is even getting a built-in testing framework, and Deno can run Typescript without an intermediate step!

Build tools for JS solve problems that other languages don't have to worry about. You can't use Python (directly) in a browser which means none of these things are important:

1. Bundle size. This doesn't really matter when you're just running it locally. Maybe you want the final binary to be somewhat small, but it could still be many dozens of megabytes and it'd be a non-issue. If a website was like 50MB, it'd be incredibly slow.

2. Platform compatibility. Every user is running a slightly different environment. Gotta support different browsers, or older ones? Now you need to polyfill the language features to exactly what the browser supports. Compiled languages don't have to worry about that at all, and even with Python, you're mostly just worried about the major language version a user might have installed (iirc).

3. Anything related to writing UIs. In JS, you're writing for the browser, which has a pretty limited set of APIs for writing complex, interactive UIs. Hardly anything to help write interactive declarative or reactive UIs. On top of that, since the site is always remote, pretty much everything has a round-trip to a server involved. This means you may start pulling in dependencies to help solve these problems. In Python, you probably just choose a UI framework like QT and it gives you most everything out of the box.

My point is just that we tend to compare JavaScript to other languages without really considering the unique environment JS gets deployed to. It's really not comparable. If Python (or any other language) was running in a browser, you'd have a huge new class of problems for that language to solve which it just didn't need to care about before.

I feel like the meaningful comparisons to JS are related to language syntax, type system, local runtime performance, dependency management, etc. And those topics are a lot more subjective!

[donkeybeer]

Platform compatibility is much easier in web compared to python or anything else native. You only have the browser to worry about and nothing else, and the variation between browsers is there but much less than the variations between cpu architectures, oses, languages etc in native apps. The variation between the two biggest ones, firefox and chrome is even narrower yet we still get "only works in chrome" or worse bundling an entire copy of a very specific version of chrome along with your app in for example Electron.

[cxr]

> Build tools for JS [sic] solve problems that other languages don't have to worry about.

Explain that to all the people writing browser extensions which by their very nature have an entirely different set of relevant engineering concerns in contrast to Web apps delivered by HTTP—and yet the same minification tools and compatibility shims still abound for as far as the eye can see.