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by 1317 480 days ago
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
2 comments
mdhb 480 days ago
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.

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wiseowise 479 days ago
> 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!

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mdhb 479 days ago
Wtaf are you talking about?
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genewitch 479 days ago
My read is those languages share features with perl

"Line noise programming languages"

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woolion 479 days ago
>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?

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