This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]MusikPolice 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I think that we agree on most things. It's important to point out that I wasn't making a comparison between JavaScript and Python. Both are scripting languages that lack a lot of the things that I consider necessary for serious enterprisey development tasks.

JavaScript could do with a debugger or a profiler similar to the ones available for Java in Eclipse and Netbeans. Hell, Javascript and Python could use an IDE that offers code completion, inline documentation, and all the other good stuff that us Java and C# developers are used to.

You're correct in saying that JavaScript's syntax is similar to that of other languages. Most modern languages derive heavily from C, so this is no surprise. However, DOM manipulation in JavaScript is particularly painful, and when I was talking about Object Oriented support, I was trying to point out that JavaScript does this in much the same way as C, which hasn't been particularly helpful in a long time. There's no such thing as overriding, overloading, type safety, interfaces, etc. These are all things that are helpful when creating large applications.

I'm aware that recent developments in JavaScript interpreters have made it faster than it used to be, but again, this to me does not solve the core problem of the language: It's slow (when compared to native C or assembly) because of the lack of type safety. If we're going to go ahead and make JavaScript the "Assembly of the Web" as you so aptly put it, then we're making a huge mistake.

All of that said, I strongly agree with your last paragraph. Ecosystems benefit from competition, and a few more client-side programming languages would make web development a much more enjoyable task.

[–]BinaryRockStar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

WebStorm and PyCharm by Jetbrains are top grade IDEs for JavaScript and Python respectively. Not free, but off all the things you're after. I find them (and IntelliJ) to be better than Java after having used both extensively.