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I get the appeal of "DAE hate JS" on Reddit where everyone upvotes you, but it seems out of place on a forum of professionals because JS is not much different t

I get the appeal of "DAE hate JS" on Reddit where everyone upvotes you, but it seems out of place on a forum of professionals because JS is not much different than other dynamically-typed languages. I'd say it's better than Python which doesn't have async-by-default nor idiomatic closures. But "puke" is a bit childish.

zimablue 8y ago
I'd kind of assume everyone on HN has made their minds up about languages and I'm not qualified to change the opinions of any of them or even really try to be informative. So the puke is just for the (70% at a guess?) people who would agree that this is a bad choice. Since I work with both python and javascript in exactly this dirty moving data around for analysts space (but haven't for long), I'll qualify a bit. The most important point is that python absolutely brutally dominates the data science space, there are no javascript equivalents to the python ecosystem, it's not even close. Secondary point is that javascript is much lower level than python in a language sense. Python already has classes built in, reflection, sane typing, just tons of batteries. Javascript as someone smarter than me said before is lisp with C syntax. It's definitely possible to build a good language out of Javascript by using the right libraries and making decisions on how you're going to implement inheritance etc but it's just tons harder than python or almost any other language which has defaults on these decisions made for you. Guys automating their data flows aren't going to be at the level to make these decisions well but they will run into the same problems they solve and implement their own insane schemes. I'd much much rather debug amateur VBA or Python than amateur javascript.
- JBReefer 8y ago
  JavaScript has every feature you listed, plus a ton. I'll give you the batteries included part, but you're missing the critical component here, which is Python's dep mgmt story is terrible. Pyenv seems cool, but it's basically NPM - which is a critical part of what they're trying to do here.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    You can definitely mess up with python envs but JS absolutely doesn't have all the features I listed. It doesn't have anything like python's built in power of classes, it's not just having a class syntax which is a thin wrapper around prototypes, it's having metaclasses, class decorators, properties, type comparison that works for inheritance, super(). It also doesn't have sane types/casts.
    - paradite 8y ago
      JavaScript by design supports both full OOP and full functional programming. There is no reason why you cannot implement what you mentioned in JavaScript.
- darkhorn 8y ago
  > python absolutely brutally dominates the data science space The language where when you 3/2 you get integer. Try R, the language created/developed by Statisricians for Statisticians. Python doesn't even have a buil-in support for missing data.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    This is out of date, 3/2 is 1.5 in latest python. I don't know what you mean by built in support for missing data but at language level there is None and in numpy/pandas there is np.NaN

zimablue 8y ago

I'd kind of assume everyone on HN has made their minds up about languages and I'm not qualified to change the opinions of any of them or even really try to be informative. So the puke is just for the (70% at a guess?) people who would agree that this is a bad choice. Since I work with both python and javascript in exactly this dirty moving data around for analysts space (but haven't for long), I'll qualify a bit. The most important point is that python absolutely brutally dominates the data science space, there are no javascript equivalents to the python ecosystem, it's not even close. Secondary point is that javascript is much lower level than python in a language sense. Python already has classes built in, reflection, sane typing, just tons of batteries. Javascript as someone smarter than me said before is lisp with C syntax. It's definitely possible to build a good language out of Javascript by using the right libraries and making decisions on how you're going to implement inheritance etc but it's just tons harder than python or almost any other language which has defaults on these decisions made for you. Guys automating their data flows aren't going to be at the level to make these decisions well but they will run into the same problems they solve and implement their own insane schemes. I'd much much rather debug amateur VBA or Python than amateur javascript.

JBReefer 8y ago
JavaScript has every feature you listed, plus a ton. I'll give you the batteries included part, but you're missing the critical component here, which is Python's dep mgmt story is terrible. Pyenv seems cool, but it's basically NPM - which is a critical part of what they're trying to do here.
- zimablue 8y ago
  You can definitely mess up with python envs but JS absolutely doesn't have all the features I listed. It doesn't have anything like python's built in power of classes, it's not just having a class syntax which is a thin wrapper around prototypes, it's having metaclasses, class decorators, properties, type comparison that works for inheritance, super(). It also doesn't have sane types/casts.
  - paradite 8y ago
    JavaScript by design supports both full OOP and full functional programming. There is no reason why you cannot implement what you mentioned in JavaScript.
darkhorn 8y ago
> python absolutely brutally dominates the data science space The language where when you 3/2 you get integer. Try R, the language created/developed by Statisricians for Statisticians. Python doesn't even have a buil-in support for missing data.
- zimablue 8y ago
  This is out of date, 3/2 is 1.5 in latest python. I don't know what you mean by built in support for missing data but at language level there is None and in numpy/pandas there is np.NaN