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Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited to see how the judicious use of JavaScript will evolve webapps beyond the Rails/Sinatra/Django paradigm, and allow you to share the code for your application between the client and the server. V8/Node.js is just the cherry on top:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/code-used-time-used-sh...

Thanks to the effort put in by the V8 team, JavaScript is now an order of magnitude closer to C speed than Ruby, Python, and Perl, and sits at the same tranche of performance as OCaml and Go.

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The really interesting language in that comparison is LuaJIT. It is faster and more concise than Javascript. It's sad that a mature, small, concise language like Lua doesn't have more traction outside niches.

Lua fails in the "batteries included" domain. It is first and foremost developed as an extension language.

Furthermore, they are not really trying to promote the language beyond its current niches.

That said, there are good third party libraries and frameworks, and a Rubygems-like system called Lua Rocks.

yeah, but so does Javascript

But the one battery that is included in JS makes it unavoidable, and most programmers (the kind that don't read HN or proggit) are the kind to not want to learn another language. If you have the choice between using the quirky thing you know or learning something else, its a good bet most programmers will choose to use the tool the know, quality of the respective tools be damned ;)

"Batteries included" refers to a comprehensive standard library, which Javascript doesn't have.

The fact that Javascript is an in important feature in software that everyone runs is a whole different kind of advantage.

An included Web Browser with 99.99% of JavaScript interpreters is a pretty big battery.

I really enjoy working with Lua, though the opportunities have been infrequent. While Node.js looks like a wonderful piece of technology, every time I hear about it I feel a bit bitter that yet another opportunity to popularize Lua has been missed.

I'm working on a project that will let you share the same view code between rails, node and browsers. email me if this is something that you'd like to hack on (or check my github)

I presume you're referring to your EJSRB project:

http://github.com/aaronblohowiak/ejsrb/

I think that the usual way to share views between different languages is to use a language-agnostic templating engine, like Mustache, or Liquid.

How does EJSRB differ?

EJSRB is a full javascript context, and javascript is a language you probably already know. While our views are separate from controllers and models, they often need more advanced string manipulation than liquid or mustache give you. The fact that it is a full javascript context means you can define your own helpers, and have them still work on the client side. For instance, say you want to generate element ids from the json data. This belongs in a function that is accessible to your view layer, but you shouldn't have to program this twice (once for server, once for client.) AFAIK, there isn't a great way to accomplish this code sharing yet.

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