
Should We Limit Web Development to JavaScript? - pbowyer
http://www.elevatesoft.com/blog?action=view&id=why_limit_web_development_to_javascript&2
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onion2k
_There 's definitely something amiss with a language if there's a list that
long of compilers/transcoders whose sole purpose is to avoid writing code in
the target language._

I don't think that's the reason why JS transpilers for so many languages
exist. The reason isn't to avoid writing JS; it's to leverage JS's "runs in a
browser" advantage. In fact, I don't believe _anyone_ out there is writing
code in one language and then compiling it to JS to run in production.

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fiedzia
See typescript, coffescript and dart. They do exist only to avoid js and go
around its issues. And a lot of people use them in production.

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onion2k
What you say is a very reasonable comment, there certainly are companies
writing in one language and compiling to JS to run their code in production if
you consider those languages to be separate to JS. I took the remark in the
article to mean languages that have their own compiled (or interpreted) output
that can _also_ be transpiled to JS through mechanisms like emscripten. In my
opinion TypeScript and CoffeeScript are effectively extensions to JS that pile
on some sugar to fix what their respective authors see as JS's problems rather
than being different languages per se. Not sure about Dart.

~~~
fiedzia
Well, if you language works on js interpreter designed for js only, its hard
to create very different language, so we fix what we can, hover small it is.
For now tools like emscripten are incredibly unpractical and come with high
cost that eats most of potential benefits. When we will have webassembly and
ability to ignore js entirely, we will probably see explosion of significantly
different languages being used. On the backend there is more and more
functional ones, and formal verification is slowly getting traction, so
probably this will propagate to frontend too.

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brudgers
Title: Why Limit Web Development to JavaScript ?

