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There's some tremendous effort being poured into making a crippled language like javascript usable, but when talking about solutions for maintainable frontend c

There's some tremendous effort being poured into making a crippled language like javascript usable, but when talking about solutions for maintainable frontend code, I'm more excited about compile-to-js languages like haxe [0], purescript [1] or ceylon [2]. The caveats I heard about transpilers often boil down to difficulty of debugging and lack of libraries. But with the amazing browser dev tools we have, debugging potential issues is not that painful. Every language compiling to js provides FFI and/or some escape hatch so you can write javascript manually, for performance tuning or for using 3rd party libs. Even if you do write "raw" javascript, some sort of compile step is unavoidable, for running jshint, concatenating, minifying, etc. Why not walk the extra mile and use a better language? BTW, I'm not saying a tool like this is not super-useful, specially if you already have thousands of lines of js code that you can't get rid of. Congrats to the Facebook team for the release! 0: http://haxe.org/ http://haxe.org/ 1: http://purescript.org/ http://purescript.org/ 2: http://ceylon-lang.org/ http://ceylon-lang.org/

stonewhite 12y ago
Last time I said this I was caught but I'll say it again. Nobody really wants to even touch Javascript without a 5 foot stick. People will tell me that it is a good language if you know how to use it, comparing javascript mastery to C mastery in a sense. I think there lies the problem.
jbergens 12y ago
If everybody agreed that most other languages are much better and more productive than javascript then we should have had one of them in the browsers already. And if the problem is just social/organizational then we might never get anything better than javascript, in which case Flow is awesome. I think Dart seems to be a great language and IE, Firefox and Safari should have implemented it years ago, but they didn't. Now I think TypeScript is a great addition to javascript and I hope they build it into the browsers but I suppose they won't (maybe EcmaScript 7 will have some parts of TypeScript in it, or parts from AtScript from Google). By the way, you probably still want minification and concateneted files when you create js from other languages. That stops me from using them, I would have many levels of tools between my source code and the production code.

stonewhite 12y ago

Last time I said this I was caught but I'll say it again. Nobody really wants to even touch Javascript without a 5 foot stick. People will tell me that it is a good language if you know how to use it, comparing javascript mastery to C mastery in a sense. I think there lies the problem.

jbergens 12y ago

If everybody agreed that most other languages are much better and more productive than javascript then we should have had one of them in the browsers already. And if the problem is just social/organizational then we might never get anything better than javascript, in which case Flow is awesome. I think Dart seems to be a great language and IE, Firefox and Safari should have implemented it years ago, but they didn't. Now I think TypeScript is a great addition to javascript and I hope they build it into the browsers but I suppose they won't (maybe EcmaScript 7 will have some parts of TypeScript in it, or parts from AtScript from Google). By the way, you probably still want minification and concateneted files when you create js from other languages. That stops me from using them, I would have many levels of tools between my source code and the production code.