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Comment by breckenedge | Hacker News Reader

So JS is delightful because we are still not actually writing JS, but stuff that looks like JS? Huh.

It's weird how JS is the only ecosystem entirely designed around the premise of avoiding direct contact with the language you're developing in at all costs.

Like, even C programmers are willing to actually write C.

Rust has a far more powerful and widely used macro system then JS but I don’t think that means rust devs are trying to avoid writing rust at all costs

The C macro language is technically a different language (though today they are specified together, they originated once as different compiler tools) than C and lot of DSLs get written in it because C programmers are trying to avoid actually writing C.

There's also a lot of C programmers that prefer to use C++ compilers in C++ mode for their C code to avoid direct contact with C specification bugs or some C standard libraries.

(Plus, early C itself was designed to avoid direct contact with Assembly languages which was designed to avoid direct contact with Machine languages some of which were designed to avoid direct contact with Microcode languages most of which were designed to avoid direct contact with TTL logic and TTL logic was designed to avoid direct contact with the useful properties of transistors for computation and so forth. Programming is turtles all the way down.)

(Also there are quibbles to be made about "at all costs". JSX is still a superset of JS syntax with a little bit extra added in. Typescript is built to be a superset of JS syntax. You can't write either without a lot of direct contact with JS. Neither seems like "at all costs" avoidance to me.)

That is not what the author said. They said the JS Ecosystem was delightful. He then goes on to describe that Ecosystem. For some people that ecosystem is indeed delightful. They love the sheer complexity it takes to deploy a JS application these days. There is certainly a lot of choice and power out there for it.

I personally am the kind of person who tries to ship my stuff as a single statically linked binary that I can just drop in place so I look as WebAssembly as a way to participate in the browser ecosystem while avoiding the whole NPM/JS Tower of development tooling complexity. I don't begrudge others from wanting to play there though.

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