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Comment by yafbum | Hacker News Reader

> I really think that the needs of server side code are different enough than the needs of client side code that we’re better off drawing from Python and Ruby than from Dojo and jQuery.

This sentence sounds ok until Python and Ruby are held as the apparent gold standard of server development. That's not really the case, I think?

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I think the historical context is necessary. At the time, Rails was a thing and python was taking server space from Java, PHP, etc. They weren't looking to those languages as standards, but rather as languages that were likely to have similar problems.

Thinking back to when CommonJS was implemented, absolutely. I don't think you'd want to call Spring or ASP the gold standards.

You know, now that I think about it, ASP might actually be the first example of a server side JS programming environment, kinda sorta. Nobody really did it, but you could use JScript instead of VBScript.

There was the Netscape JS stuff, but I don't think it was nearly as popular as Classic ASP by 2000. I wrote a lot of ASP in JScript, was able to reuse validation libraries, etc for common inputs/forms which was nice at the time. I think the difficult points, were COM iterators were kind of alien feeling in JScript, and developing COM controls at the time were awkward and a real pain to debug/diagnose even in VS at the time.

Not to mention, very little in the space of Classic ASP was open-source, free or even anything not insanely expensive from what I recall at the time. What was in the box was pretty much just JS and VBS, and most of what you could piece together was sluggish as all hell. Cool, you can use the spell checker from MS-Word... damn, three users tried to use it at the same time on the server. etc.

I have some fond and nightmare memories from those days. I think in terms of before jQuery (though scriptaculous, prototype and others were cool), after jQuery and after Browserify and 6to5/Babel. The ESM transition is much, much slower going.

Remember this was 10+ years ago. Many of the contemporary gold standards weren't fully a thing yet.

what are the contemporary gold standards?

Compared to JS it's hard to throw a rock and not hit something better than it...

But I can confirm deploying Python or Ruby apps is generally bigger PITA.

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