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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly my issue with all this modern JavaScript / Node-stuff.

The boilerplate just to get the simplest thing started is brutal. Now I'm dealing with some Vue3/Quasar/TipTap stuff, and I still don't know what exactly I have there, but just that it is working somehow.

Python is such a pleasure to work with that I wish that all this modern web stuff were more like it.

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If you try simple vanilla javascript, then you may be surprised at how pythonic it is in cerain ways - e.g. just open a browser (any browser!) and you have a javascript REPL read to go in the developer tools.

Node severely complicates and confuses things, but node alone is not javascript. Vanilla JS is IMHO a very nice and expressive language, and you do not need any of the Node/Webpack/React/Vue/jquery/whatever to do effective things in Javascript these days as it is very capable on its own.

I usually do use Vue and Quasar via UMD (?) directly in the browser together with http-vue-loader, which makes it bearable and is pretty powerful as well, but then there's a lot of handpicking with libraries like dayjs (when used with plugins) or TipTap which then just doesn't scale, so you need to start to use some tooling. So you fall back to the recommended tooling and then it begins.

Oh, there is another way to code with JS on the server side? Something else besides node?

Try http://deno.land - think of it as sequel to node (written by same guy who created node, aiming to fix mistakes of the past - e.g. deno does not use NPM)

Don't code with JS on the server side at all. There's no real advantage to having JS both on the server and in the client, and there are plenty of alternatives that actually support the features Typescript and the like pretend exist in JS, but really don't.

That sounds like that should have started with "Don't code with Typescript on the server side at all" instead. If Typescript is pretending things unsuccessfully, you might as well stick with plain Javascript. (It wouldn't surprise me if Javascript ultimately lived longer, just like Smalltalk actually outlived Strongtalk in the end.)

Deno, as someone mentioned. Also, Civetweb embeds Duktape. Also, txiki.js embeds QuickJS. So there's at least three other options with varying features. You should try Deno first, though.

> Vanilla JS is IMHO a very nice and expressive language

I agree, and the runtime and browser is also a very nice framework for gui programming.

Python is a mess too! There is pip which works great(if you’re lucky), but then the scientific community moves to a different variant of cinda like every two months, which just isn’t necessary usually and way more complicated than just using pip

Oh yeah I personally dislike python a lot because of all the pip and easy_install and anaconda nonsense that exists (existed?). It is a shame that python for some reason became the defacto ML language that people use - I do not really understand how that came to pass (sure there are lots of libraries that help with ML now, but that is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation)

I'm not a fan of node, but python is horrible in this regard, especially with package management and environments. I'd take "make random js code work" to the python equivalent any day, which is already a bigger challenge nowadays because of the chaos caused by the ES module transition. Other challengers are C++ (because people get creative), C# (1000 different runtimes and library support) and Java (I don't know where to start).

I have a love/hate relationship with Go but this is the area where it shines.

Interesting to read your last line about Python after reading the top comment here with a link to this Twitter thread. (https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1522633160483385345)

The last time I tried to do something within the Python universe it was pretty painful as well. So I can relate to the Twitter thread.

Agreed, but as for Python, it doesn't have to run in both CLI and the browser, where both are entirely different environments. You don't need to transpile-and-typecheck from Python-with-types to Python-you-can-run. And yet, there are enough complaints about trying to get other people's Python to run on one's own machine, even in this very comment thread.

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