Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

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> However, it finally seems like JS is getting some of its core problems solved and is getting usable. I wonder if it might have short term productivity loss as the churn ramps up to new levels with a million different choices of language/platform.

This announcement means JavaScript can no longer rely on "you must target JavaScript to work on the web" as a motivating factor. The set of people who like JavaScript as a language in its own right can keep using it, and will have the advantage of new JavaScript engines and extensions implemented on top of WebAssembly. However, the set of people who would rather write in another language will no longer be constrained by waiting for JavaScript to catch up.

Personally, I think this will be a good thing for both JavaScript and other languages.

I'm 100% ready to jump ship there. I would rather work at a shop that does any other language besides Javascript for web guis even with more than a decade of js dev under my belt. The problem is they are impossible to find.

> The problem is they are impossible to find.

Scala.js[0], GHCJS[1], and Js_of_ocaml[2] among others.

[0] http://www.scala-js.org/

[1] https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs

[2] http://ocsigen.org/js_of_ocaml/

Languages that compile to JS are plentiful; shops that use those languages are much less so (with the possible exception of coffeescript).

I believe smrtinsert is referring to places that you could work at to write those languages, not that the languages themselves are impossible to find. I don't know if anyone is actually being paid by someone else to write ScalaJS, GHCHS and/or Js_of_ocaml.

> places that you could work at to write those languages

Ah, missed that, assumed OP meant if only there was a way to write JS without having to write JS.

There are some end to end Clojure shops. Pretty sure Relevance uses cljs.

I have already replaced all JavaScript with Go (by using GopherJS compiler) in my personal projects, as of about a year ago.

I am really enjoying it and I don't see myself going back to writing JavaScript by hand anytime soon. I use it to do some frontend stuff that involves DOM manipulation, XHRs, WebSockets. Another use is WebGL, it allows me to write simple multi-platform games in Go that target OS X, Linux, Windows, but also the browser. I would not be writing those games in JavaScript by a long shot.

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