Given your extremely outsized reply I can tell this is something you feel passionately about or whatever, but the “JS was built in x days” line is a thought-terminating cheap shot. It doesn’t acknowledge the vast amounts of work that have gone into subsequent ES versions. The JS that a typical remotely-modern-tech-stack developer is writing these days is not the JS that you’re belligerently referring to.
I’ve got honestly no idea how long it took to write the first ‘version’ of the Python interpreter or whatever. It’s not as much a piece of tech lore that was later (mis)appropriated for Internet arguments. Even after acknowledging that JS being a browser-based language causes let’s say ‘less well-considered’ language quirks to hang around for longer than we’d like, I’d never use that as such a central argument.
To be clear: in my day job I predominantly write Python. It’s a web project, which I have control over the architecture of, and it’s for the most part oldschool server-side rendered Django views, in no small part because JavaScript scares me. I am FAR from a fanboy. Having recently spent a solid month writing TypeScript - which for contexts like this should be considered ‘JavaScript’ - it’s (way too late) become clear to me that it’s a language worthy of respect and consideration.
If we want to get into the comparative qualities of JS you dislike, well, I still don’t think I’d be interested in a language wars back and forth. However at least we’d be getting closer to a productive conversation. And, to be clear, I’m not jumping to take up arms arguing that JavaScript is as suitable for ML/scientific computing as Python is. Even if we pretend that e.g. pandas and numpy were available for JS, I’m still not confident that JS is up to the task, but I also don’t feel confident arguing against it either.
What I will say is that, coming back to writing Python after being deep in JS for just a little while, there are JS language features that I felt myself missing. Just like there are Python language features I felt myself missing in JS. My point is, again, that modern JS is in my eyes within the realm of respectable general purpose language, ESPECIALLY with TS.
> What I will say is that, coming back to writing Python after being deep in JS for just a little while, there are JS language features that I felt myself missing. Just like there are Python language features I felt myself missing in JS
I relate to this a lot. If I've been doing Python a lot, JS can feel clunky. If I've been doing JS/TS a lot, Python feels clunky. I think TS tips the scales here for me though
The only language that I really feel is actually really elegant and readable and lives up to the "get stuff done" mantra in a way that goes beyond "this is what I know already" is Ruby
I’ve got honestly no idea how long it took to write the first ‘version’ of the Python interpreter or whatever. It’s not as much a piece of tech lore that was later (mis)appropriated for Internet arguments. Even after acknowledging that JS being a browser-based language causes let’s say ‘less well-considered’ language quirks to hang around for longer than we’d like, I’d never use that as such a central argument.
To be clear: in my day job I predominantly write Python. It’s a web project, which I have control over the architecture of, and it’s for the most part oldschool server-side rendered Django views, in no small part because JavaScript scares me. I am FAR from a fanboy. Having recently spent a solid month writing TypeScript - which for contexts like this should be considered ‘JavaScript’ - it’s (way too late) become clear to me that it’s a language worthy of respect and consideration.
If we want to get into the comparative qualities of JS you dislike, well, I still don’t think I’d be interested in a language wars back and forth. However at least we’d be getting closer to a productive conversation. And, to be clear, I’m not jumping to take up arms arguing that JavaScript is as suitable for ML/scientific computing as Python is. Even if we pretend that e.g. pandas and numpy were available for JS, I’m still not confident that JS is up to the task, but I also don’t feel confident arguing against it either.
What I will say is that, coming back to writing Python after being deep in JS for just a little while, there are JS language features that I felt myself missing. Just like there are Python language features I felt myself missing in JS. My point is, again, that modern JS is in my eyes within the realm of respectable general purpose language, ESPECIALLY with TS.