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It's also not entirely about clarity of facts per se, but rather which facts. It's clear for a javascript developer that doing NPM install is going to bring in
by lhorie 6y ago
It's also not entirely about clarity of facts per se, but rather which facts. It's clear for a javascript developer that doing NPM install is going to bring in half the universe worth of transitive deps and that they can opt out by writing things by hand.
Most js developers' goals are indeed not to write the smallest hello world, and here we are in a world where people complain of news websites pulling MBs of scripts. As I mentioned, one could conceivably address this by merely picking jquery over react in many cases, for example. There's a predictable sliding scale of performance between using electron, nodegui and qt proper via c++. Etc. All of this is to say: Defaults and base choices matter.
I think in terms of servicing end users, rust and c++ are somewhat unique in that they are relatively complex languages targeting ambitious performance goals, at the cost of more language complexity. That has its own appeal for sure, but I echo esbuild author's sentiment about a language having to be fun for side projects, and for me personally, I like the simple "very sharp knife" variety of technologies