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Comment by gocsjess | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript is a highly productive for Web Applications, although I also heavily use other alternatives for several reasons, But regardless, that is why it is my candidate for the best programming language especially working with the Web and Web applications in general. Anything beyond that is either niches or outside general purpose web. JavaScript can do:

- advance web applications (electron, NodeJS)

- ETL on the go (i.e. fetch, JSON, DOM, SVG)

- data visualization (i.e. d3, three.js, etc.)

- dependency management (i.e. NPM, CDN, ESM like in Deno)

- learning resources in general (extremely abundant and comprehensive on various sources)

It is hard not to learn JavaScript, it is almost everywhere. Also having to learn the 2nd or the 3rd programming language should also fill-in those gaps, even those huge gaps.

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JS is ubiquitous. It's also a primitive, sloppily-designed language that has caused untold economic damage. It's not as bad a language as, say, Perl, but it might be the single biggest thing holding back the Web as a platform today.

I do understand that it's not entirely fair to criticize it for being sloppy, since it was supposed to only be a stopgap to be used for a few years in the 1990s until the hypothetical better language came along. Perhaps WASM means this long wait is finally over, but I don't want to get my hopes up.

I'd say javascript is the new Perl (I used to love writing perl way back). It is undoubtedly useful, but can be horrific to read. It is heavily used to get things done in a pragmatic way.

The difference I see is that it will not likely die as quickly and quietly due to how distributed the code is.

Now that you mention it, the resemblance is pretty clear. I also have to admit that I agree that we probably are stuck with it for the future. There are languages I think much more highly of that compile to WASM, and that's a technique that I plan to use and that I anticipate gaining traction. But there's just so much JS around.

I do love Perl and JS for the same reasons: You can write something and be sure it will keep working. It is not customary to introduce breaking changes.

...Do you write in lots of languages that add breaking changes without warning? I don't.

I have encountered it with many languages. There is usually a warning, but there is also a lack of consent on my part, and a lack of options to retain compatibility.

For example, with most Python-based projects I have tried, I have run into some kind of version incompatibility, and often have not been able to get them to run at all.

This is an experience I wanted to avoid for those who try my software.

> Python

Aha, there's your problem.

That's exactly what I was talking about, and why I chose Perl as the "top-level" language for my project over Python, despite Python being very popular.

That would certainly be one solution.

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