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I don't understand why you're getting downvoted, completely agree. I'm hoping WebASM can save the browser from this foul language. Don't even get me started on

I don't understand why you're getting downvoted, completely agree. I'm hoping WebASM can save the browser from this foul language. Don't even get me started on server-side JS; if it were a nice, sane scripting language, I'd agree, but the amount of hoops, translators, hackish dev tools etc that have been thrown into the mix to wrangle it into a workable experience... it's too much.

ravenstine 8y ago
I get your hope for WASM, but I'm not so optimistic. That's not because I don't think that WASM would allow for "better" languages(I personally like and prefer JavaScript), but the future you are suggesting might cause even more fracturing in the web development community than already exists with frameworks and changes in ECMAScript. Arguably, such fracturing already exists with frontend frameworks. But what will that be like when we become fractured by language? Plenty of people like and prefer JavaScript, but seem to be at least as many people who would rather use an entirely different language on the frontend. I know someone will want to chime in and point out that WASM will still need to interact with JavaScript, but that's not really the point; once JavaScript as a language can be effectively ignored by the developer, that complicates our occupation in terms of interoperability. One of the great things about web development was that workflows could be different but, at the end of the day, the end product is(was?) essentially HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There were only so many languages we needed to learn in order to write servers, and at the end of the day we just needed to make something respond to HTTP requests. I chose web development because it wasn't going to pigeonhole me as much as other fields of software engineering; one can, or could, take their web development skills from one company and easily apply them to another, no matter the scale. Today, we have a constantly evolving browser language, several frontend frameworks and rendering libraries, not just PHP; ASP; and Perl for the server but Python; Ruby; Java; Elixir; Node.js; Groovy, and a wide variety of toolchains and transpilation setups. Now, we're going to open the frontend floodgates to different language runtimes, and along with them even more frontend debugging tools? This field is becoming way less fun. It's not that I don't understand the desire for choice or to simply not use JavaScript, but I doubt that as humans we won't naturally take the freedom given to us and use it to our detriment.

ravenstine 8y ago

I get your hope for WASM, but I'm not so optimistic. That's not because I don't think that WASM would allow for "better" languages(I personally like and prefer JavaScript), but the future you are suggesting might cause even more fracturing in the web development community than already exists with frameworks and changes in ECMAScript. Arguably, such fracturing already exists with frontend frameworks. But what will that be like when we become fractured by language? Plenty of people like and prefer JavaScript, but seem to be at least as many people who would rather use an entirely different language on the frontend. I know someone will want to chime in and point out that WASM will still need to interact with JavaScript, but that's not really the point; once JavaScript as a language can be effectively ignored by the developer, that complicates our occupation in terms of interoperability. One of the great things about web development was that workflows could be different but, at the end of the day, the end product is(was?) essentially HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There were only so many languages we needed to learn in order to write servers, and at the end of the day we just needed to make something respond to HTTP requests. I chose web development because it wasn't going to pigeonhole me as much as other fields of software engineering; one can, or could, take their web development skills from one company and easily apply them to another, no matter the scale. Today, we have a constantly evolving browser language, several frontend frameworks and rendering libraries, not just PHP; ASP; and Perl for the server but Python; Ruby; Java; Elixir; Node.js; Groovy, and a wide variety of toolchains and transpilation setups. Now, we're going to open the frontend floodgates to different language runtimes, and along with them even more frontend debugging tools? This field is becoming way less fun. It's not that I don't understand the desire for choice or to simply not use JavaScript, but I doubt that as humans we won't naturally take the freedom given to us and use it to our detriment.