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Just as a curious reader, what exactly is it that makes you very much prefer Python to JS? As someone who uses both professionally I rarely if ever miss Python

Just as a curious reader, what exactly is it that makes you very much prefer Python to JS? As someone who uses both professionally I rarely if ever miss Python features in JS (or vice versa for that matter, aside from the lack of multi-line anonymous functions or block scoped variables in Python)

traverseda 6y ago
Tooling and libraries mostly. In python the ideal is there "should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do things". This makes it a lot easier for me to reason about other people's code. The tooling is also an issue, with how much it can take to get started coding. There's also stuff that surprises me around variable scoping, I imagine I'd get used to it but... There are also just a bunch of foot guns I have to re-learn, like the comparisons often being bizarre, it's easy to work around all those when you're aware of them but there are a lot of those little eccentricities.
w0utert 6y ago
Obviously some of this is subjective, but the main points of frustration are the terrible standard library, the type system requiring you to use things like ===, !== to prevent crazy type conversions, the total lack of advanced built-in data structures, and the fact that you pretty much need to use transpilers to use all the language features, things like coffee script to get a sane type system etc. JavaScript lugs around a lot of legacy and it leaks out in bad way. That, and I absolutely detest the whole npm ecosystem and most of the rest of the typical JavaScript toolchain. That said, I appreciate its ubiquity, and it does have some nice things lik very good support for functional, reactive and/or async programming styles. But like I said, I may not be entirely objective as I work almost exclusively in C++ and backend Python these days, so JavaScript is pretty far outside my comfort zone anyway.

traverseda 6y ago

Tooling and libraries mostly. In python the ideal is there "should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do things". This makes it a lot easier for me to reason about other people's code. The tooling is also an issue, with how much it can take to get started coding. There's also stuff that surprises me around variable scoping, I imagine I'd get used to it but... There are also just a bunch of foot guns I have to re-learn, like the comparisons often being bizarre, it's easy to work around all those when you're aware of them but there are a lot of those little eccentricities.

w0utert 6y ago

Obviously some of this is subjective, but the main points of frustration are the terrible standard library, the type system requiring you to use things like ===, !== to prevent crazy type conversions, the total lack of advanced built-in data structures, and the fact that you pretty much need to use transpilers to use all the language features, things like coffee script to get a sane type system etc. JavaScript lugs around a lot of legacy and it leaks out in bad way. That, and I absolutely detest the whole npm ecosystem and most of the rest of the typical JavaScript toolchain. That said, I appreciate its ubiquity, and it does have some nice things lik very good support for functional, reactive and/or async programming styles. But like I said, I may not be entirely objective as I work almost exclusively in C++ and backend Python these days, so JavaScript is pretty far outside my comfort zone anyway.