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Comment by chrisjharris | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure that somebody has thought this through more fully than myself, but the impression I have is that for software, the benevolent dictator model works best. Python and Javascript occupy adjacent places in the programming language firmament, but the Python language (with van Rossum having fairly tight control over it), although bloating somewhat over time, has still ended up quite a lot more elegant than Javascript.

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Ironically, Guido got dethroned precisely because python became too popular and “you can’t please all of the people all of the time” so he just walked away.

Now they have committee meetings to decide if an idea is good enough to form a committee to discuss if a committee should be formed to discuss the idea — though, probably not exactly like that…

Modern python is not more elegant than modern JS, I disagree (I’ve been coding in both for over 15 years).

Python has a good degree of elegance to it, and it does have less warts due to its less stringent backwards compatibility requirements. But JS is very elegant, and better at it than python thanks to python’s shitty lambdas vs js anonymous functions.

Maybe a silly question, but if js is such a complete language, why are there so many js frameworks being developed all the time, all seemingly with the goal of making it easier to do fairly basic tasks with js?

Elegance and completeness are two different things. But to answer your question anyway, I would say a framework's goals are more specific than the language's.

For example, Python serves both the data science community and the embedded community. The two have wildly different goals, and thus, different frameworks to achieve "fairly basic tasks [for their domain]".

JS serves so many different communities/domains, which is why there are so many frameworks. Larger audience, with even more different needs. The fact it can serve so many different audiences is a testament to its elegance.

There’s nothing elegant about continuously accreting features.

If JavaScript were limited to The Good Parts I could say it’s elegant. As it stands I’d describe it as more akin to Frankenstein’s monster but riddled with tumors.

This was not the question being answered.

There was no question to be answered.

You responded to an opinion which compared the relative elegance of two scripting languages with your own opinion.

I also provided an opinion.

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