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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

For all of the JavaScript frameworks/libraries/toolchains that were supposed to solve front-end development woes, we could have had a language that actually did that.

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seriously Google probably put a couple billion person-hours just into V8 optimizations, we could have just had a language that makes sense, is efficient, and doesn't have endless footguns.

Lua would be a strong contender.

I think a lot of people would reject any dynamically typed language at this stage.

A few years ago before ES2015 sure. But JavaScript has come a long way, it’s a much more pleasant language to work with nowadays. Typescript also plays a strong role with that. Lua used to be marginally better than JS, now JS is better and it’s not even close. Also Lua metatables suck.

Would you mind giving examples of why.

Genuinely curious.

Would below be examples you were thinking of:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1022560/subtle-differenc...

That would just end up being another Adobe Flash which one company controls. Always bet on web standards.

Probably not billions. Each person (at a 40-hour workweek) works about 2000 hours a year. V8 has been around for about 16 years. 1 billion hours would mean (1 billion / (16*2000)) = 31,250 people full-time on V8 optimization. A google search seems to suggest that the actual headcount for the full V8 team (not just the optimization team) is probably in the 3-digits.

> V8 has been around for about 16 years.

Huh, well, clearly that's impossible. It was first released in 2008, and I'm still an 18-year-old with a full head of hair, faith in humanity, and hope for the future, so it can only have been around for a year or two at most.

I don't think both things compare well: optimizations are a clear target for software and computer science professionals while languages add a personal preference: I love Python but don't like C++ while I prefer Rust over Go.

That's precisely what the creator of V8 did; he created Dart. See the context from munificent, who currently works on Dart:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33524437

Pretty sure big Google products like Maps are written in Dart, no?

There are two kinds of languages: ones that everyone complains about and ones that no one uses.

Elm was a pretty noble attempt—all things considered.

Does Elm support SSR?

The evolution is Gleam + Lustre (its main FE framework).

You get all of Gleam's advantages compared to TS (simple, truly type safe, errors as values, exhaustive match, etc), and Lustre is great because you get an Elm that can be run on both the client and server, using whatever fits that specific part of your website best (unlike HTMX or LiveView which are server-only).

Wrote a blog post about it:

https://blog.nestful.app/p/gleams-lustre-is-frontend-develop...

Didn’t know… awesome!

Imagine the world if <script type="text/python">

That's much scarier to me.

Okay, what if we just use Java instead of Java"script"?

Now you are just crazy

Java applets were a thing. Emphasis on "were"

They were security nightmares.

The reason why there's churn in the web ecosystem isn't because Javascript is missing some minor syntax changes that Python has. It's because UI development is a constant workshop for discovering better abstractions, particularly in bridging the gap between server and client-side code in the browser.

Personally, I think the real problem with the web ecosystem is HTML. HTML is for printed documents as web "pages," literally. It even has <figure> which is for "fig. 1" kind of things.

HTML is so bad that we NEED Javascript because CSS isn't enough. For example, there is no way to define a layout in HTML for different screen sizes and then SEPARATELY define the content of that layout. Nor is there a way to define in HTML that a div should jump from one part of the screen to another if there isn't enough space. We spent years telling the lie that we're supposed to split semantics and presentation, but in reality CSS simply doesn't provide enough power to actually ignore the structure, since you can't tell div1 to align itself to div2 if div2 isn't an ancestor or sibling of div1. Now every website looks extremely simple because if they made it even a tiny bit more complicated it would be impossible to make the flexboxes wrap right with just CSS.

We need HTML2.

We don't need another version of HyperText Markup Language.

We need something else. I don't know what it is, but another way to markup text doesn't sound like a great fit for a new way to build user interfaces.

Whatever it is, it should have a readable plaintext format. Maybe a DSL of sorts.

Well, we "need" Javascript because it provides programming capabilities that HTML, being a markup language, cannot provide on its own. HTML is just the substrate for representing the UI.

All you would be doing is creating another programming language while taking another swing at coming up with yet another abstraction for UI dev like everyone before you.

It kind of exists.... as a js library - ofc.... Who would have thought.

It is called HTMX and its successor data-star.dev

HTMX addresses none of the issues GP mentioned.

... I was listening to a podcast about HTMX as a new thing to take a look at this last summer, and there's already a successor to it?

Jfc, it hasn't been a year yet.

data-star isn't a successor to htmx, it's a pretty different take on hypermedia, using SSE for a streaming, dynamic hypermedia driven system. cool, definitely capable, but significantly different

htmx generalizes hypermedia controls, and that's all it will do, forever

Not really HTML2. Almost all current UI engines uses an xml variant, and they have a much lower number of components and a simpler foundation. And they provide you with a easy-to-use 2d context when you need to do custom components. What we need are better primitives for web applications. And separated from the web as documents.

Elixir

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