If people didn’t like JavaScript for front end work, it’s not like they could just switch to python
Also there have been attempts before but nothing really stuck. How many non-Googlers use Dart?
Yew [1] is one of the early Rust frameworks for client side work. It allows for multi-threaded (!) execution and javascript interop.
Not many other languages make sense as you have to pack in the whole runtime, GC, etc. Rust is pretty well positioned for WASM, and it's going to take off soon.
Sure, they can, both via compile-to-JS solutions like Transcrypt [0], and via generate-the-frontend-with-backend-Python solutions like idom [1], Plotly Dash [2], and others.
[0] https://www.transcrypt.org/
Even native languages like C/C++/Rust compile their language into binary format that the platform can run. It just so happens that the web runtime format is JS instead of binary machine instructions.
That’s what sourcemaps are for; you don’t have to debug compiled instead of source format on the web just like you don't on other platforms.
It is, just as using compile-to-(or interpreted-by-a-runtime-in-)-native-code languages is a solution to “I don’t like raw x86_64 machine code for desktop applications”, even if you end up running machine code in the end.
> Also Dash is absolutely terrible, horrible documentation, horrible code.
“X is not a choice people can make” is a different claim than “One example of X is not something I personally would recommend”.
As to your second point, that's why I put it in parentheses, of course it doesn't refute your claim but if you use as example a technology that has awful documentation because of this two-language paradigm, and leads to garbage code both at the Python stage and the Javascript stage, to me it doesn't paint a good picture of the whole concept.
Clearly, there are people that disagree with this value judgement, and the existence of that disagreement is an existence proof that Python for frontend is, in fact, a choice people can make, even if it is one you find unattractive.
I think theres legitimate reasons to compile Python to JS, but "JS is bad" can't be one of them, since you still have JS that you have to worry about. It makes sense for codesharing with server code or preexisting business logic.
Over the years I've debugged js compiled from various languages, and it's seriously a terrible experience: however bad you think debugging handwritten js is, reading and debugging generated js is strictly worse (and you will have to)
Or...maybe I won’t; I’ve used plenty of compile-to-JS languages (including what starts as “js” with JSX and modern features but gets compiled to plain, and more widely supported, JS), and I spend as much time reading and debugging JS in its compiled form as I do reading and and debugging .NET or Python bytecode instead of source, which is none.
Sure you could. You can develop for the web in practically any language you like these days. People use JavaScript because it has native support for the DOM that nothing else can match. Until we get away from the DOM for application development, it will always be king.
Sure it does. DOM support is built into the very core of JS as a language, and that has shaped the entire history of its' development and subsequent API choices. It's not just a library that it happens to support, the way it would be with any other language.