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Comment by mighty_bander | Hacker News Reader

It's such a shame! JS could be a concise little language with a lot of power (in terms of being able to ignore types until they matter), but instead you end up transpiling unusable garbage with 10MB string manipulation libraries that release breaking changes as patch versions. Python is what JS is supposed to be, although I do feel like Bart Simpson in front of the blackboard every time I write `lambda x:`.

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Being a small language would be irrelevant to JS. The web could benefit from a sound type system built into browsers (aka typescript in the strict mode), but it's not like anybody complains about python lacking the type system, right? What web really needs is a way to write highly modular apps and let the browser download only relevant modules, with caching, prefetching and so on. None of the attempts have worked so far. If you look an any app today, it looks like the main module that has static deps on other modules that deoent on other modules and so on. When everything is linked together, we get this 50MB binary. Not a big deal for native apps or services, but it's a big deal for web apps that need to download all this mess and maybe actually use 20%. There is no way today to conveniently write a web app that would pull only necessary modules at runtime. It's not just that the language is missing some keywords, it's about the entire web world is designed around static linking: we'd need to redo existing non modules, existing frameworks, upgrade to http2 for batching multiple requests to download a bunch of small modules and so on. That's a lot of work that needs a lot of expensive devs and the returns of that work are non existent: there's no profit to be made there. That's why it'll stay this way: bloated web apps with thousands of unused deps.

> anybody complains about python lacking the type system.

Well, Python does have strong typing. It's just dynamic, not static, and I've seen enough criticism about it to say that it isn't as unimportant as you make it out to be. JavaScript gets a lot of criticism for having dynamic and weak typing. And I think both forms of criticism are valid, though not everybody agrees, which is fine too.

What makes webapps bloated is the require-at-the-top pattern. Type system makes no difference here. What most devs don't realize is that if their precious app written in holy C plus plus or Java got compiled into a standalone binary that could run on any device inside a browser, it would be a 150 MB mess that wouldn't even boot. All these nice frameworks, libs and utils would need to be downloaded before the app can start. We'll see this soon with wasm, btw.

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