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Comment by mweibel | Hacker News Reader

why not Go/Java/....? Honest question.

At least for Java, PHP has the massive advantage of "change the code, save it and hit cmd+r" while Java, JavaScript and .net require recompiling, repackaging and deployment.

At work I develop for both PHP and Java projects and... it's cumbersome to develop for Java projects, to say it nicely. Ever tried developing for Jira, Jenkins or enterprise CMSes?

> while Java, JavaScript and .net require recompiling, repackaging and deployment.

Not to be a pedantic curmudgeon... actually, precisely to be a pedantic curmudegon... javascript does not require any of that.

The byzantine and asinine ecosystem that has sprouted like a cancer around javascript when SV and Node noticed the language and its profit potential, fueled by hype and unnecessary complexity? Yes. But the ecosystem is not the language.

Javascript itself is exactly like PHP in this regard - you edit a file, upload to the server, refresh the browser.

Everything else is unnecessary. Useful? Maybe. Bullshit? Probably. But not necessary.

I was recently surprised with this. I liked ThoughtWorks' tech radar. It's all client side JS, but uses node for some reason. Took longer than I expected to figure out the ecosystem (hadn't used node before), and it didn't appear to add much value for this use case. It also downloaded a boatload of node modules, and something called Cypress that takes forever to run. In the end it produces a fairly pedestrian client only SPA.

It's like the tale of the boiling frog. I don't like how with old school Javascript you have to add script tags to your html for each library you want to use, at some point you start using a bundler, then a package manager so you don't need to download them manually, then a compiler so you can use newer Javascript syntax, and so on and so on. Each step is better than the last one, but when you look back to the start things do seem simpler back then.

Since when does native/plain nodejs reload the source file(s) it’s running when they’re changed on disk?

I'm not talking about the limitations of Node.js, I'm talking about javascript as it's deployed to the web, from a server, running in the browser.

That use case, the one for which the language was intended, does indeed work as described, and has for decades.

Right, I didn’t get that at all from your original post.

sure, there are pros/cons in all languages. My question was specificly to the sentence about "strongly typed mainstream high level language" - as there are many languages who fit that definition.

Maybe they prefer optional OO over mandatory or no OO?

maybe? I wouldn't know.

"strongly typed mainstream high level language" does not say anything about that, hence my question.

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