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I'm always dubious on claims like these. JavaScript and the web platform are synonymous in discourse but much different in reality. Even with transpired languag

by dexwiz 1y ago

I'm always dubious on claims like these. JavaScript and the web platform are synonymous in discourse but much different in reality. Even with transpired languages or WASM, you still have to use the platform, but now in a non standard language. JavaScript isn't that hard, and I really question if not having to learn it really saves time.

flohofwoe 1y ago
IMHO no platform should force a specific programming language on the programmer, and JS is a lousy compilation target (compared to WASM at least). But the biggest problem of the web isn't actually JS or WASM, but the inflexible DOM and the (for the most part) poorly designed web APIs.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  Blazor generates HTML, but doesn't allow direct manipulation of the DOM unless you start jumping through a lot of hoops. It's generally "good enough" until you get to things like maps or charts with 1000s of datapoints.
gwbas1c 1y ago
> Even with transpired languages or WASM, you still have to use the platform, but now in a non standard language. That's the entire point of WASM: To program in the browser using any language you want. IMO, the big flaw is WASM is that browser APIs aren't "first class." IE, all calls to the browser APIs have to go through JavaScript.
- dexwiz 1y ago
  That's my point, it's still calling JS at the end of the day. Unless you have some computationally expensive functionality that needs optimization like a large Canvas or Excel-esque table, what's the advantage? Just avoiding JS is not enough of a reason for me. In principle I support WASM, but in actuality I think it falls short for the majority of applications. It's much easier to learn JS than the web platform. Might as well learn it in the primary language.
  - gwbas1c 1y ago
    I disagree; language choice for a project has a lot of factors: Team familiarity, the need to compile or not, ect, ect. This is why there are also languages like TypeScript, but they wouldn't work in our case because we want to keep the corpus of languages small.
  - xigoi 1y ago
    > It's much easier to learn JS than the web platform. Just because I know JavaScript doesn’t mean I want to use it. It’s an ugly and cumbersome language.
const_cast 1y ago
It's not that learning JS is hard, it's that JS is a very unsafe and unergonomic language. Which is why we have TS... but TS has other problems. People want to use C# or what have you because these are languages that are simply better to develop large applications in. JS, like most dynamically typed scripting languages, becomes more and more of a liability as application size grows.
- msgodel 1y ago
  JS was always supposed to be a scripting language. That you could build whole applications in it was a neat hack but never supposed to be serious. I think a lot of people have forgotten that.

by dexwiz 1y ago

flohofwoe 1y ago

IMHO no platform should force a specific programming language on the programmer, and JS is a lousy compilation target (compared to WASM at least). But the biggest problem of the web isn't actually JS or WASM, but the inflexible DOM and the (for the most part) poorly designed web APIs.

gwbas1c 1y ago
Blazor generates HTML, but doesn't allow direct manipulation of the DOM unless you start jumping through a lot of hoops. It's generally "good enough" until you get to things like maps or charts with 1000s of datapoints.

gwbas1c 1y ago

> Even with transpired languages or WASM, you still have to use the platform, but now in a non standard language. That's the entire point of WASM: To program in the browser using any language you want. IMO, the big flaw is WASM is that browser APIs aren't "first class." IE, all calls to the browser APIs have to go through JavaScript.

dexwiz 1y ago
That's my point, it's still calling JS at the end of the day. Unless you have some computationally expensive functionality that needs optimization like a large Canvas or Excel-esque table, what's the advantage? Just avoiding JS is not enough of a reason for me. In principle I support WASM, but in actuality I think it falls short for the majority of applications. It's much easier to learn JS than the web platform. Might as well learn it in the primary language.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  I disagree; language choice for a project has a lot of factors: Team familiarity, the need to compile or not, ect, ect. This is why there are also languages like TypeScript, but they wouldn't work in our case because we want to keep the corpus of languages small.
- xigoi 1y ago
  > It's much easier to learn JS than the web platform. Just because I know JavaScript doesn’t mean I want to use it. It’s an ugly and cumbersome language.

const_cast 1y ago

It's not that learning JS is hard, it's that JS is a very unsafe and unergonomic language. Which is why we have TS... but TS has other problems. People want to use C# or what have you because these are languages that are simply better to develop large applications in. JS, like most dynamically typed scripting languages, becomes more and more of a liability as application size grows.

msgodel 1y ago
JS was always supposed to be a scripting language. That you could build whole applications in it was a neat hack but never supposed to be serious. I think a lot of people have forgotten that.