Cool project. I'll never understand why anyone wants to program in JS though.
From what I've read, other Prototype-based languages treat Javascript as their ugly step cousin, and I would overall consider it a much inferior OO system to that found in Python, Ruby, CLOS, Perl's Moose, and PLT-Scheme, to name a few.
You can easily get rapid redeployment in any dynamic language. You can even get it on the JVM with Java, as the Play framework is showing us. See http://www.playframework.org/.
If Javascript is your first dynamic language after developing in Java for X years you might think it is neat, but it is really far behind just about every other language out there it directly competes with on the server-side level. It was never designed to be a scalable general purpose programming language and the latest incarnation is still far from reaching that lofty goal.
Lots of folks only see the DOM and the bad parts when working with JS - these two projects have shown me there's so much more.
Agreed that you can't blame Javascript for the DOM, but there are lots of bad parts aside from that. Default global scope and semioptional semicolons are gigantic WTFs, the with statement should be nuked from orbit, and there are generally lots of ways to write code that appears to be correct but is just waiting to fail in bizarre ways. It's just annoying that we're stuck with Javascript because it's so entrenched, while Python and Ruby offer all of its strengths in much saner packages.
I can't speak for Ruby, but in many ways JS is more powerful than Python, especially on the functional side of the house.
For me, approaching JS as a functional language has been the key to writing good clean JS. jQuery helped me with this by allowing me to ignore all the psuedo OO stuff in JS and concentrate on the functional features.
2. No you can't, not anymore than you can reuse Java code between client and server with GWT. The difference between a browser and a client environment is just so great. NaCl will hopefully provide a way to bridge that gap, but that will work for every language, not just Javascript.
3. PyPy is starting to catch up to v8. This point is irrelevant for the AppEngine, by the way. I doubt Rhino is any faster than Jython.
4. Ever heard of Jython?
5. Ever heard of Jython?
Certain languages get way over-hyped on HN, and Javascript is one of them.
of course it is
> No you can't, not anymore than you can reuse Java code between client and server with GWT. The difference between a browser and a client environment is just so great.
pure bs, obviously you don't know what you are talking about. I am reusing extensively between server and client, not only for simple stuff like validations, but also to render graphics (have a server side canvas implementation that renders to svg), to perform web crawling (I use a simple version of envjs and jQuery/sizzle on the server side for crawling), i use the same template engine on server side and client side, etc, etc...
> 4. Ever heard of Jython?
Why would I be interested in Jython??!
2. Sorry, let me rephrase my point here. You can reuse code, but not all code. Any code you could reuse could also be re-used in another languages using tools like GWT, py2js, j2js, etc, mitigating server-side javascript's advantage here.
As for points 4 and 5, I couldn't care less whether you're interested or not. My point is that javascript has no unique advantage here over most other popular scripting languages, and you made an earlier comparison to Python, hence the Python example.
Javascript is a great language with some mistakes. a lot of the mistakes (including some you mentioned) are fixed in Ecmascript 5. I programmed in Ruby from 2002 since 2009, and I am happy I switched to JavaScript: I prefer the syntax, I totally love prototipical inheritance, I love to object literal notation, and the use of closures everywhere.
> 2. Sorry, let me rephrase my point here. You can reuse code, but not all code. Any code you could reuse could also be re-used in another languages using tools like GWT, py2js, j2js, etc, mitigating server-side javascript's advantage here.
as I said, pure bs.
> 4.5.
JavaScript has some advantages and some disadvantages to Python. AppengineJS is for people who know JavaScript (just about every web developer) and do not want to learn Python. If you know Python, just stick with the Python SDK.
With so many projects coming out using JS as the primary scripting language, I am probably going to have to suck it up and learn to love it methinks. Just not yet. ;)