4 ms·

Care to share what you think would constitute a “good” lingua franca for the web?

• Silhouette 6y ago
  I think it is precisely the development of WASM as an alternative first class citizen to JS that has the potential to create a new lingua franca. As for what we might one day build on top of it, I'm not sure the ideal language or languages exist yet. I do think there is the potential to have something that retains the relative ease of access that languages like JS, Python and Ruby have offered, but with a much better type system, and perhaps designed with the kind of API-heavy and event-driven programming we use on both the front and back end of many web apps in mind. I suspect that to break into such a huge ecosystem, it would need to have almost transparent interop with JS so in the early days it could use the existing libraries, though I would also hope that many of those libraries would immediately be obsolete or would soon be replaced by native alternatives anyway given that most of them are relatively basic by general programming standards.
  • franklyt 6y ago
    Thanks for your thoughts. The notion of there being no sufficient existing language for web development is an interesting one.