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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

You are not paying attention. WASM's ecosystem is moving slowly but surely in the direction of JS being thrown away for good. Ain't happening anytime soon -- sadly -- but especially with WIT used to specify various modules and collections of modules plus having more or less uniform function specification, the days of JS' monopoly are numbered. The writing is on the wall. There are successful WASM web apps not written in JS today.

JS is being tolerated. Not adored.

Frontenders are living in a bubble and don't see it.

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> There are successful WASM web apps not written in JS today.

Such as?

> JS is being tolerated. Not adored.

Can you prove it? I’ve seen enough people of JS being adored. I am one of them (maybe because I use it mostly for hobby projects).

If you haven't coded serious projects in at least 5 very different languages, you likely adore one language because you just don't know better.

There is such a variation between js, perl, python, rust, C#, lisp, bash, haskell, erlang and sql that the blind spot is huge.

It's like eating hot dogs all your life and debating food merits with people that tasted japanese, indian and french food.

I’m mixing Python, C++, Java, Kotlin and shell scripting professionally. Used to work on enterprise C# project. Experimented on a hobby level with Elixir, Haskell, OCaml, Ruby, TypeScript, JS, Dart.

I'm recently enjoying F# a lot. What really sold it was partial application and absolutely bonkers type inference with gradual typing. You just write code and let type system infer the signature of the functions, only specifying the types when necessary. It's so much cleaner and I'm sorely missing it in C#.

It's a bit off-topic but if you liked Elixir it's kind of like Elixir but fast, and like OCaml but widely usable in production. It could also be familiar after Python due to mostly indentation-based scoping and not having to define signatures (except you go from something terrible and untyped to Hindley-Milner).

Python, C++, Java, Kotlin and shell scripting are all globally mutable procedural / imperative languages. Of course you'll also like JS.

Spend several years with LISP, Elixir, Haskell, OCaml, then you'd be in a better position to say you keep loving JS.

You are sticking to the same type of languages. This warps your point of view.

What an obnoxious and condescending response. They said they've used those languages. Consider that these languages have huge flaws of their own. Elixir doesn't even have a proper language server. Using niche languages does not automatically make you special on internet forums.

amen. there’s people that use haskell, ocaml, lisp… and then there’s rest of us that do actual real work :)

Oh yeah, that's not obnoxious at all. :D

Lost on your way to Reddit, I see.

you can dish it out but you can't take it, I see... :)

I said was that I believe the poster lacks the perspective to criticize certain languages. That was and still is the topic.

You are free to interpret it any flame-bait ways. I ain't biting though.

Peace.

did you actually read the post? where from his post do you get "poster lacks the perspective to criticize certain languages?"

and of course even more pertinent - which languages did he even criticize other than to point out things that are not possible in Scala/Rust (certainly not a critique, each language has its pros/cons...)

Elixir has two fully functional language servers and it's very far from niche, or I've been spending imaginary money for the last 9 years.

What I said still applies, the guy seems to have a familiarity bias and said nothing to show otherwise.

As for being condescending, your reply seems like a textbook example.

> Such as?

I forgot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do remember I've seen one website emulating parts of Photoshop that was made with WASM but I lost it since I have no interest in the area.

You can take a look here though: https://madewithwebassembly.com/

And don't try to pick those apart one by one. Point was that WASM works and people do stuff with it. I've seen it several times and since it's not my main area of interest plus I don't get paid for it, I am not exactly keeping up to date every week.

> Can you prove it? I’ve seen enough people of JS being adored. I am one of them (maybe because I use it mostly for hobby projects).

Can I prove it? How would I even do that?

We all have anecdotal evidence, plus I am not secretly one of the sysadmins of Stackoverflow or Reddit. People literally have no choice but to ultimately use JS when coding for the browser, and that's a fact of life. There's Typescript nowadays and I hear from frontenders that it's definitely better but they also say every now and then you have to drop to JS and this is where they start sighing.

So no, I can't prove it. But the mere fact that JS is a monopoly of sorts, plus it has a huge and well-documented number of problems should incline you to believe as I do.

Finally, if you allow me, you have answered your own question by saying that you use JS mostly for hobby projects. That changes things SEVERELY; you are enthusiastic about the thing you are working on and the potential idiosyncrasies of the chosen tech (in this case JS) are seen as small and only mildly annoying hurdles. And if you get tired or annoyed you can just drop the hobby project until your enthusiasm gets naturally rejuvenated.

Start working with it every day and having to integrate with a lot of 3rd party libraries and other people's code and then tell me you love JS.

...And I've heard that too btw (that people work with JS every day and love it) but as a sibling comment pointed out, you likely don't have the perspective of working with other languages with very different features and tradeoffs.

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