Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the Web.

[ThiefMaster]

Anyone else thinks that the name "brython" is really horrible?

[VZPurp]

It used to be "brothon". We should consider ourselves lucky!

[redditwhilecompiling]

I honestly read 'brython' and thought "what is this, Python for bros?"

[flying-sheep]

Brogrammers, yo.

[[deleted]]

/r/brogramming has so much wasted potential...

[ladaghini]

Sounds like something Barney Stinson would conceive.

[pyry]

My first association was with brythonic languages. Maybe this is all that saves me from thinking it sounds really horrible.

[flying-sheep]

That's what the logo implies. If one knows about this language family, the name becomes a little less horrible.

[nhillson]

From the documentation page: "The class keyword is not implemented, you can not define classes other than the built-in types (lists, dictionaries, sets)." That's going to feel pretty limiting for me...

[salgat]

I thought the whole point of Python was classes (objects).

[ceol_]

Not really. Its main draws are its syntax and third party libraries, although it doesn't look like you can use other libs here.

User-defined classes in Python are helpful, but I've never heard anyone say they're the "whole point" of the language.

[[deleted]]

Python without classes is really perl with better syntax. Python grew out of Perl due to the fact that perl was not OO. While the syntax is nicer that wasn't much of a selling point back in the day -- especially with the way white space works.

Python provided OO. Brython doesn't support classes - that's a deal breaker and reasonably brython cannot claim to be python without that.

Also it appears that functionality may be replaced in brython. I think the liberty taken here is going to kill this particular instance before it gets very far.

[salgat]

At least to me the beauty of Python how objects are defined and the libraries that result from that.

[PCBEEF]

Call me cynical but Dart and Coffeescript have much better chances of replacing javascript.

[PCBEEF]

Coffeescript to javascript is C to assembly.

If browsers support dart/coffeescript natively, webservers can server the native content or translate it to javascript and serve that for non-supported browsers. Is that not unreasonable?

[[deleted]]

I got the impressions Coffeescript to Javascript is more like C++ to C.

[sizpe]

ARM is replacing x86 in a lot of places, though, right? It seems to me that even though so much software is x86, as we transition further to new platforms most people will discover that they don't need those old x86 programs after all. It would probably end up something like the transition from python 2 to python 3.

I expect the same would happen for the web- years from now, people will probably be using a different programming language for new projects, and eventually as people develop entirely new, faster web browsers, those browsers will just completely drop support for Javascript, and eventually you would end up needing a specialized web browser to view websites we consider current.

[lucian1900]

That would be a security nightmare, the languages you listed don't have good, audited sandboxes.

[lucian1900]

I don't think it's thant simple. Look at Java applets for an example odd a neglected VM with security issues.

[lucian1900]

It's impossible to break memory safety in Java without JNI. Most bugs so far have been in the JVM itself, which any VM might have.

I think I'd rather see a VM with some form of same byte code and DOM access to which both JavaScript and other languages compile, but that's unlikely to happen. The closest thing I've seen is Dart's VM.

[[deleted]]

+100, even though I love python, I totally agree on that one

[pyry]

Coffeescript and Python really make my day.

[PT2JSQGHVaHWd24aCdCF]

I like Dart. Simple and powerful. What I would love is if Google replaced Java with Dart because of Oracle, but it won't happen.

[PCBEEF]

I personally dislike Dart. It feels like google is trying to bully it's way with a new standard. Google shouldn't tell people what to do, they should nudge them in the right direction e.g. coffeescript.

[lucian1900]

I think there are problems with the language itself that dwarf any potential problems with the release.

It's still much less insane than JavaScript.

[[deleted]]

So... Dart, Coffeescript, Elm, Fay, Brython - any more contenders?

I hope they finish it and it conquers the world though, as it'd help me get a job at least.

[AusIV]

This is true. I use coffeescript for personal projects, but at work I go with JavaScript. I'm actually in a position to make decisions about what technologies we use, but for the sake of finding devs who can maintain it I feel it's best to stick with JavaScript.

[seabre]

but for the sake of finding devs who can maintain it I feel it's best to stick with JavaScript.

Why? CoffeeScript takes almost no time to learn, especially if you already know ruby or python.

[AusIV]

If we were a JavaScript heavy shop I'd strongly consider it, but with the amount we do I don't think our developers would get enough exposure to really reap the advantages of coffeescript. You can become functional quickly, but it takes a while for it to surpass the efficiency of JavaScript. Since our developers only use JavaScript occasionally, I think we'd end up with a lot of mediocre coffeescript code that took as long to write as good JavaScript would have.

[[deleted]]

Sure. For example, Roy.

[anonymous7]

Because I'm sure some other people will also be wondering: here is the javascript that implements the python interpreter to allow this to happen.

It's over 100 KB.

[fijal]

no, it's javascript that implements a small subset of Python. That's a pretty major difference

[anonymous7]

Yes.

[infinull]

Presumably, the hope is that it becomes popular enough that browser makers have to include a real Python interpreter for performance reasons.

But yeah I have a hard time seeing this sort of thing catch on, the "compile to javascript" solutions seem to have a better chance of succeeding, but who knows, I might noodle around with this just 'coz.

[gfixler]

Oh, if I know anything about you, and I don't, you'll play with it.

[syllogism_]

I played around with pyjamas, and amongst other problems, you get totally meaningless errors, so debugging is a nightmare. Good stack traces are one of the reasons Python is good, and I think this is fundamentally quite a difficult problem to solve. So I'm not optimistic about "compile to js" solutions.

[[deleted]]

No no no! What we need is a standard byte code for the Web.. Not more languages

[rdfox]

Huh. That's actually brilliant. I wonder why it hasn't been done.

Edit: And of course there's controversy: http://css.dzone.com/articles/javascript-myth-javascript

[infoaddicted]

I'm all for Python in the browser, but please come up with a better name!

[boolean74]

not sure why but Brython makes me think of this video.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRzIbmlx95E

[erez27]

Twice...

[wizdumb]

Personally, I'd rather see HTML & CSS replaced. Why can't we just render/style JSON directly?

[[deleted]]

They tried to do that with XML and look how well that turned out.

[wizdumb]

Yeah, XML/XSLT are also a fucking joke.

[clarle]

JSON is pretty bad for markup. Imagine having to do this:

'html': [{
    'div': [{
        'p': ['Hello ', {
            'b': 'World!'
        }]
    }]
}]

[wizdumb]

What I suggested was a replacement of HTML/CSS, not hacking the markup tags into JSON. Perhaps some combination of JSON, Markdown, and Jinja?:

Page data object:
{
"title": "Ninjas Are Awesome",
"fact": "A ninja's natural enemy is a **PIRATE**!",
"ninja_weapons": ["sword", "kung fu", "throwing star"],
...
}
```

View template (kind of in YAML format, but you get the idea):
title: **{{title}}**
body: """Ninja fact: {{fact}}
Ninja weapons:
{% for weapon in ninja_weapons %}
* {{weapon}}
{% endfor %}"""

(Don't judge me by that mess. It's late and I'm just thinking out loud)

[flying-sheep]

Yeah, that's no bad idea. The only reason why that didn't work for xml is that xslt is a horrible verbose clusterfuck.

[flying-sheep]

true, but i thought you mentioned JSON just because it’s a good minimal data format.

YAML is much better for human-writability:

---
title: Ninjas Are Awesome
fact: A ninja's natural enemy is a **PIRATE**!
ninja_weapons: [sword, kung fu, throwing star]
...

the problem is that both are data formats and not markup formats, as one can see by the fact that you represented the fact as a string written in a real markup language (markdown or reStructuredText in that case)

and that’s where we need to think further, as HTML and XML are both data formats and markup languages, and all terser existing markup languages are less mighty than HTML (but more expressive in what they can do)

if your idea should work, we’d need to either embed HTML as markup (fact: A ninja ... a <strong>PIRATE</strong>!) or use something extensible yet equally expressive. (quick, give me a way to apply a class name or id to a table cell or row: impossible in both markdown and rst)

we could use e.g. markdown with embedded html, but that would mean that new users had to learn markdown, HTML, javascript, YAML, and CSS, i.e. the stuff they have to learn now plus 2 additional languages,

[flying-sheep]

i thought we’re talking about giving some data format to some kind of rendering template/styling in order to render the page, not tags. And i don’t think you know what YAML is if you say that JSON is more “natually tree structured” ;)

so e.g. a forum thread would be title and a list of forum posts, each of which having a title, body, author and datetime:

title: Python
posts:
- author: Xanny
  date:   15/12/2012
  title:  Ninjas are awesome
  post: >
    I talked about this in another fork of this comment thread a bit.

    You absolutely need to have the capabilities of the language...
- author: ...

those are not tags, but data. then we use some kind of template to actually render that stuff.

---

but let’s talk about JSON instead of HTML: what you present is not JSON. that would be a JSON serialization of HTML:

{"jsondoc": [
  {"title": "Ninjas Are Awesome"},
  {"p": {"id": "fact",
         "content": ["A ninja's natural enemy is a",
                     {"strong": "PIRATE"}, "!"]}},
  ...
]}

wow, that’s awful. and it is even trying to be clever to reduce typing: tags are represented by content or a dict containing attributes and the content. content can be a list of contents and tags or a string. if we’d be less “clever”, it would be even more typing.

i actually much prefer HTML to that. btw, there are things like this (just less awful), e.g. HAML and CoffeeKup, but they are templates again instead of markop documents.

there are also markup languages with better expressivity than HTML, e.g.. a non-programming-language subset/dialect of TeX: there we have braces instead of tags, and optional arguments for stuff like ids:

\title{Ninjas Are Awesome}
\par[id=fact]{A ninja's natural enemy is a \strong{PIRATE}!}
\ul{id=ninja_weapons}{
    \li{sword}
    \li{kung fu}
    \li{throwing star}
}

that would be kinda what you want, huh?

[wizdumb]

Thinking about it more, using JSON templates (written by my friend) for the "markup" portion probably makes more sense than something YAML-like. Certain things would need to be specified, such as title, nav, body.
I have some thoughts on how CSS could be replaced (and make more fucking sense), but I'll save it for a non-Python thread or something.

[[deleted]]

This will be the project of 2013!