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Comment by March_f6 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, sure. But at a certain point, LISP was Javascript in terms of bleeding edge no? As someone who has built multiple things using React Native I can absolutely relate to the churn, but each time I willfully wade into it and each time I get better at handling all the pains that come along. I also can't think of a better way to improve debugging skills than to use a tech stack that gives rise to issues not easily solved via StackOverflow.

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Keep in mind Lisp predates the Internet by many decades.

The Lisp tradition is to leverage the expressiveness of the language to quickly create functionality that would be included as libraries in other languages. If you need an algorithm implemented, just do it and if it turns out you need it hyper-optimized and able to handle the pathological cases you look for someone who has something like that.

The JavaScript tradition (once NPM became a thing) is almost the opposite, look for a library first, and if you can't find one then consider making it yourself and posting it for others.

Lisp was theory before it was code.

Javascript was a fashionable imitation of another popular language dialect.

> In 1995, Netscape Communications recruited Brendan Eich with the goal of embedding the Scheme programming language into its Netscape Navigator.[16] Before he could get started, Netscape Communications collaborated with Sun Microsystems to include Sun's more static programming language, Java, in Netscape Navigator so as to compete with Microsoft for user adoption of Web technologies and platforms.[17] Netscape Communications then decided that the scripting language they wanted to create would complement Java and should have a similar syntax, which excluded adopting other languages such as Perl, Python, TCL, or Scheme. To defend the idea of JavaScript against competing proposals, the company needed a prototype. Eich wrote one in 10 days, in May 1995.

Perl, Python, Lua were not ready for embedding (unsafe FFIs, OS-dependent APIs) and would have been flash-frozen in early bad states. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155. Better that JS got the early bad state freezing and thawing (ES3 helped; ES5 was constructive and ES6 made JS pretty good).

In early 1996, John Ousterhout stopped by to pitch Tcl/Tk, but it was too late. VBScript was coming, but JS in 1995 Netscape betas got on first and saved us from that dystopia.

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