This talks a bunch about the "good run" of current scripting languages, including for example JavaScript. But JavaScript, as an actual scripting language, has

This talks a bunch about the "good run" of current scripting languages, including for example JavaScript. But JavaScript, as an actual scripting language, has been pretty primitive. It is only now starting to become a real candidate for actual scripting. There's imo crufty not very great options like shelljs[1]. But by adding a tagged-template string for system() for calling things, and a little bit of standard library, the recent ZX has made JS a much more interesting & competent scripting language[2]. I like the idea of the topic, exploring it. But the author feels off in a number of places. > What TypeScript showed is that you could join together the idea of a flexible lightweight (and optional!) type system onto an existing programming language, and do so successfully. . . .The question then is - what if you created a programming language from the start to have this kind of support? Personally I just don't think languages matter very much. They're very similar, by & large. They have different tooling, packaging, somewhat different looks/feels for executing code, and their standard libraries are different. But TypeScript is popular & fast at least 90% because it is JS, because it works with JS things. Arguing that we should try to recreate TypeScript apart from JS sounds like a mind blowing waste of time. Also, Deno has good integrated TypeScript support. On the topic of easy parallelism, JavaScript promises are imo quite easy to stitch together & use & quite available. One of the main issues I see with easy-parallelism is that it's too easy: there's too many cases for uncontrolled parallelism. Throwing tarn.js or other worker-pools at problems seems all too common. But one is still left stitching together each pool/stage of work. I'd like to see SEDA[3] like architectures emerge, and perhaps get added to something like ZX standard library. [1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs [2] https://github.com/google/zx https://github.com/google/zx [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_architectu...