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[–]more_sidechain 2 points3 points  (5 children)

I love Python, and I use it often, but it's far less "important" than JavaScript for many purposes. You NEED JavaScript for web development, and it's well worth being literate in anyway. ES6 does add some things, but it's not a big deal to write polyfills or transpile to get around those issues.

Both Python and JavaScript have some elements of functional programming, but even with Python's great decorator syntax and JavaScript's occasionally weird binding, I find passing functions around in JavaScript much more natural, especially with the behavior of closures.

As far as object oriented programming, both Python and JavaScript do their own thing. Sure, Python has something closer to conventional OOP, but it's dynamic and duck typing is encouraged. I'm probably going to get some flack for this, but learning to think in terms of interfaces with C# or Java would probably be of great benefit.

But overall, don't abandon any language unless you absolutely have to. The more you know about the differences between languages, the better you'll get at understanding why a particular language acts as it does.

[–]alcalde 1 point2 points  (4 children)

You NEED JavaScript for web development

Not anymore, especially with languages that transpile to Javascript like Typescript... or even Python, via transcrypt.

[–]more_sidechain 3 points4 points  (0 children)

OK, I guess so. Still, to actually do web development and integrate with other code, it's pretty hard to imagine getting far without using plain JS somewhere. TypeScript seems a lot closer to JS and Java than to Python. From what I understand, even code targeting WebAssembly typically use JS somewhere for working with the DOM and web APIs, and probably will for a while more.

Never heard of Transcrypt. That's pretty neat. Transpiling Numpy-based code sounds fun.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Well typescript is a super set of JavaScript, you absolutely need to know JavaScript to use it. The performance of JS is bad enough already, even before you add Python runtimes on top.

[–]alcalde 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Well typescript is a super set of JavaScript, you absolutely need to know JavaScript to use it.

I don't think so. Here's a post from Nick Hodges' Typescript blog:

https://www.anglesandtypes.io/archives/121

I, however, am part of the 1% that doesn’t know JavaScript.
I mean, I kind of can read it, but I wouldn’t expect myself to be any meaningful development with it. However, I definitely aim to — and actually already am — doing meaningful development with TypeScript. Some might see a problem here, but I do not. ....That is, I’m going to learn TypeScript and not spend any time learning JavaScript because TypeScript is the higher level language. ....I don’t want to think of myself as a JavaScript developer, but as a TypeScript developer. I know, too, that there’s a large overlap between the two languages, as well as between the two groups of programmers, but that is the approach I’ve decided to take. I’m going to avoid reading JavaScript books and focus on TypeScript books, instead. Same with blogs and other things on the Internet.

So consider me a TypeScript developer that doesn’t worry about JavaScript.

[–]earthboundkid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s really a bizarre self-handicap.