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People often look at things like this like 'why would you...' But it is an interesting experiment that might make web programming more accessible. I think of my
by ruffrey 11y ago
People often look at things like this like 'why would you...' But it is an interesting experiment that might make web programming more accessible. I think of my physicist cousin who uses python for data analysis. An option like this might lower the barrier to sharing data on the web - less JavaScript ecosystem knowledge required. JavaScript frontendy land moves so fast it can be overwhelming to outsiders, even if JavaScript itself is "easy."
- xaduha 11y agoYou need exactly zero knowledge of Javascript to share data on the web. Plain server generated HTML + some CSS framework is more than enough for most cases. Even if you want some more interactive stuff you don't need to know the "Javascript ecosystem". It's still possible to link a couple pf JS files in script tags, you know. It's even possible to link XSLT 1.0 stylesheet for some non-interactive clientside processing.
- magnumkarter 11y agoThis was my first reaction, but one of the examples allows dom manipulation. https://github.com/koehlma/jaspy/blob/master/example/hello.py https://github.com/koehlma/jaspy/blob/master/example/hello.p...
- gedrap 11y agoAs with everything, there are trade offs and in this case, I don't think they are worth it. What are the most common use cases for JS, that might be a barrier to an unfamiliar developer, requiring some learning? I believe that making an ajax request and some trivial DOM manipulation covers a lot (say, send ajax request to the server and add some text returned to a dom element). In order to do that, you don't need some fancy framework, plain simple JS will do it. Arguably, it will be even easier to do it in JS than in e.g. Python, because there are tons of examples on the web in case you need to extend the functionality. Occasionally, you will need some visualization (chart or something), but then it's mostly just finding some library and transforming the data into the required format, that's simple enough to do with a language that you are not an expert in. After all, isn't web development already accessible? I would argue that this is the most accessible of software development, with huge amount of high quality, accessible learning resources and various frameworks that enable to develop complex features rather quickly, if needed. True, there's always something that can be improved but I don't think that Python-to-JS solves anything. However, I genuinely believe that a project such as this is a cool side project to explore and improve your software development skills :) so often 'why would you...' can be answered with simply 'because it's fun'.
- threatofrain 11y agoWeb development only moves at fast speeds if you want to adopt the frontier solutions. If you want, you can still use Wordpress or Joomla or whatever, you can still use Bootstrap, you can still use Jquery. These are all optional and have been stable for a decade. A person without interest in web development, such as a scientist who wishes to publish a blog, should be fine with a pre-baked solution like Wordpress. Even if they're comfortable with Python, there's no reason to replicate what "core" Wordpress does, which is no small undertaking. Also, a person working in a field that just happens to use a sprinkle of programming would have to learn a lot of tangential junk just to replicate what pre-baked solutions do, and they would probably do it poorly. It would be better if such individuals just paid for an affordable solution or used something like Wordpress.
- supergreg 11y agoThings like this will totally make sense once they are done in WebAssembly.