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I don't know if I agree or disagree with your general thesis, but it has to be pointed out that the JavaScript ecosystem is even more complex than Python -- des

I don't know if I agree or disagree with your general thesis, but it has to be pointed out that the JavaScript ecosystem is even more complex than Python -- despite the fact that it doesn't have to deal with a C ABI -- and I think this is in fact largely because the language has resisted change so much that everything has just moved beyond the language itself to some form of transpilation. The world changes. Software development changes. The best way to guarantee that your entire codebase will become an obsolete monolith that eventually needs to get replaced is to make sure that you choose an ecosystem that isn't growing and changing too. Yes, there are COBOL and Fortran and whatever else programs still running out there. But software is not mostly a "one and done" thing, and unless you're confident you're writing something that's "one and done", then these comparisons are truly irrelevant.

josephg 3y ago
> I think this is in fact largely because the language has resisted change so much that everything has just moved beyond the language itself to some form of transpilation Resisted change? JavaScript has changed massively in the last 12 years I’ve been using it. Promises, generator functions, es modules, webassembly, const/let, arrow functions, destructing, classes, iterators, you name it. The fact that JavaScript is also a compilation target isn't because JavaScript doesn’t change much. It’s because the web is so important, and people wanted to use new JavaScript features before they became widely available in browsers.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  They resist expansion pretty strongly even if they love change. Like, remember when Google wanted to put Dart in the browser natively? Nobody liked it, and now we're stuck with build steps for quite a while until JS finally adds typing, which might never happen, especially because insane people seem to think canvas+WASM is a good idea for anything but the most specialized uses...
  - josephg 3y ago
    The choice not to add Dart into Firefox and safari was made by the browser vendors. It had nothing to do with the JavaScript standards committee. But to your point I do think it would be great if typescript got first class support by V8 & friends. Type information could dramatically improve JavaScript execution speed. Meticulously deleting all the types before passing code to V8 seems like a very silly choice. I’ve been working in rust the last few years. I wish rust were as open to change as JavaScript is! Generators (aka coroutines) have been sitting just out of reach in nightly the entire time I’ve used the language.

josephg 3y ago

> I think this is in fact largely because the language has resisted change so much that everything has just moved beyond the language itself to some form of transpilation Resisted change? JavaScript has changed massively in the last 12 years I’ve been using it. Promises, generator functions, es modules, webassembly, const/let, arrow functions, destructing, classes, iterators, you name it. The fact that JavaScript is also a compilation target isn't because JavaScript doesn’t change much. It’s because the web is so important, and people wanted to use new JavaScript features before they became widely available in browsers.

eternityforest 3y ago
They resist expansion pretty strongly even if they love change. Like, remember when Google wanted to put Dart in the browser natively? Nobody liked it, and now we're stuck with build steps for quite a while until JS finally adds typing, which might never happen, especially because insane people seem to think canvas+WASM is a good idea for anything but the most specialized uses...
- josephg 3y ago
  The choice not to add Dart into Firefox and safari was made by the browser vendors. It had nothing to do with the JavaScript standards committee. But to your point I do think it would be great if typescript got first class support by V8 & friends. Type information could dramatically improve JavaScript execution speed. Meticulously deleting all the types before passing code to V8 seems like a very silly choice. I’ve been working in rust the last few years. I wish rust were as open to change as JavaScript is! Generators (aka coroutines) have been sitting just out of reach in nightly the entire time I’ve used the language.