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Comment by chpatrick | Hacker News Reader

What job are we talking about and why is TypeScript or typed Python actually bad at it?

I'd say Typescript/JavaScript on the backend are a bad idea across the board. That's not really because of this conversation, just in general.

The comment about Typescript was really about JavaScript. It's a patch on top of JavaScript, which is a shit show and should have been replaced before it ended up forming the backbone of the internet.

Python, typed or otherwise, isn't good for anything past prototyping, piping a bunch of machine learning libraries together, or maybe a small project. The minute the project gets large or starts to move towards actual production software Python should be dropped.

Happily using both in production here, guess I'm just hallucinating.

I'm not saying you _can't_ do it. You could write production software in Bash if you really wanted to. I'm saying there are much better options.

I don't think writing your frontend in Rust instead of TypeScript or your computer vision pipeline in Java would be better at all. We rewrote our frontend in GHCJS (Haskell) at one point and it was a colossal waste of time.

Where did I say write your front end in Rust or Haskell?

Okay, what's the great compiled alternative then?

If you read what I wrote you'd see that I said JavaScript/Typescript on the BACKEND is always a mistake. It is an unfortunate reality on the front end, and one that should have been replaced entirely when the web started to move towards webapps.

WASM is obviously an option these days and well, but my understanding is that it's a long way from taking over.

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