[pedrocr]

The web is the only platform where people routinely chide other people for wanting to use their favorite programming languages. For some reason not liking Javascript and wanting to use something else is offensive to a lot of people. In all the other platforms some language may dominate but others are still used and don't cause these reactions.

[1317]

on other platforms, all languages are relatively equal, it's the same effort to use language a as it is to use language b, and you can get nice results with both

vs on the web, javascript is built in, and you have to specifically go out of your way to use something else (which be a worse experience than the one that's already built in*)

*idk, i don't have personal experience, but i think that's the reasoning at least

[mdhb]

The entire point here is that this is changing.

Granted to various degrees. Running Python, Ruby or PHP in the browser requires shipping a interpreter compiled to WASM and is indeed a lot of overhead, however compare and contrast that with say C, Rust, Dart, C++, Kotlin or C# which all have dedicated WASM compilation story’s which ship native WebAssembly bytecode without the interpreter overhead.

For a lot of those languages they are on an equal footing to JS in every non DOM manipulation context and only getting better overtime as more and more WASM proposals start to move through the standardisation process unlocking better performance and capabilities.

I think in that particular light, it’s very hard to see JS holding the same privileged position on the web it traditionally has. A new generation of languages are emerging which are much much nicer to work with.

[wiseowise]

> C, C++, Kotlin

> much nicer to work with than JavaScript

Glorified assembly, if war crime was a language and a marketing tool to promote JetBrains IDEs that barely works outside of JVM. Truly nice way to work!

[mdhb]

Wtaf are you talking about?

[genewitch]

My read is those languages share features with perl

"Line noise programming languages"

[woolion]

>on the web, javascript is built in

That's not even true except in the sense that the browser will (most likely) run it (well, some subset of it...). Compilation or transpilation of a language are not considered to be "going out of your way", unless you only program in assembly. And even JS-based stacks tend to have some form of compilation step to gather and process 'assets bundles'. So why not use a modern language that has more web-oriented features than JS?

[DeathArrow]

>For some reason not liking Javascript and wanting to use something else is offensive to a lot of people.

For some people it's offensive even if you try to use some other language to write desktop and mobile apps.

[azangru]

> The web is the only platform where people routinely chide other people for wanting to use their favorite programming languages.

Oh, I've been plenty chided for wanting to use Node on the server, and not something faster like Go. Although you may have included web backend into 'the web'.

[socketcluster]

It's not offensive. It's just very stubborn. JavaScript has been bashed incessantly. People would actively look for all the bad parts just to complain about it... Totally ignoring all the good parts and the fact that it was extremely well adapted to an evolving web environment and also well-suited for being standardized.

The people who are pushing for Python in the browser are going to be in for a shock when they realize how inconvenient Python's indentation is to deal with.

[dragonwriter]

> The people who are pushing for Python in the browser are going to be in for a shock when they realize how inconvenient Python's indentation is to deal with.

The people who are pushing for Python in the browser are generally extremely familiar with Python, its indentation, and how silly this argument is.

[socketcluster]

I meant, it is inconvenient in a web context. People do crazy stuff with JS like minifying it writing it all on one-line in the console during testing. It would be different with Python. Sometimes I do write JS functions as one-liners for testing. The Chrome dev console isn't very good at handling tab characters or new lines.

It opens up a whole new can of worms.

[DeathArrow]

>People would actively look for all the bad parts just to complain about it...

What are the good parts? When you only have a hammer, everything is going to resemble a nail.

Javascript was designed to manipulate the DOM and bring a bit of interactivity to otherwise static web pages.

It wasn't designed to write applications in. Nor it was designed to be used for web backend, mobile software and desktop software.

It's like some people try to write everything in Bash and protest when some other people want to use other languages.

[shermantanktop]

I’m no python expert but I’ve written a bit, and indentation has just not been a problem in practice.

You can certainly have an aesthetic or philosophical issue with it, but you said “inconvenient” which is a practical concern.

[holdenweb]

Monopolists never like it when their monopoly is threatened ... ;-)

[wiseowise]

Yeah? For some reason I don’t see Python, C#, Java people constantly bitching about monopoly of C in OS space.

I also don’t see many people complaining about native gui toolkits, they just silently use their cross platform stuff and that’s it.