Not JS, but I much prefer TS over Python. I've used all 3 pretty extensively for scientific work as well as webscraping
The thing is a lot of scientists are going to have to learn FE technologies eventually. The push to make scientific work more presentable and accessible means JS' place in academia is cemented for a long time.
WebAssembly is still a long way off and given that even Rust WASM was found to usually do worse than JS, I highly doubt Python WASM will outperform it any time soon. Even once it does become worth it, tooling has a long ways to go
> people would rather write Python for ~accomplishing the task they set out to~ than have to muck around with another language entirely.
your argument seems to boil down to: people know Python so they wanna use Python. People can just as easily know JS/TS. If I'm a botanist and I really don't wanna invest too much of my time in learning languages I can choose between Python, the language with all the scientific libraries, and JavaScript, the language of the web. If I choose the former, I'll likely have to bother someone to help me present my work to the web anyways. If in the near future JS also reaches good support for scientific/ml libraries it seems like entering that ecosystem is an obvious advantage. I get to learn the web and access scientific libraries at the same time
Also I don't really find Python all that legible. The language you're describing isn't Python nor JavaScript. It's something like Ruby. Modern javascript has some obvious advantages when it comes to syntactic sugar like arrow functions. It's also easier to teach because you don't need to install anything. Just open up your html file in any browser
> If in the near future JS also reaches good support for scientific/ml libraries it seems like entering that ecosystem is an obvious advantage
Fully agree with this sentiment. To that end, I’ve been contributing to Shumai (linked by someone else in the comments) to enable torch-like machine learning for Bun
Super exciting! I'd love to see Bun take a focus on this. Tbh with Deno's recent massive expansions to npm support it's kinda hard to see what role Bun plays in the ecosystem. Focusing on performance critical work like ML and crypto would cement it's place and fill a niche that's underserved. At least until WASM works as advertised but it seems that's kind of a ways off
The thing is a lot of scientists are going to have to learn FE technologies eventually. The push to make scientific work more presentable and accessible means JS' place in academia is cemented for a long time.
WebAssembly is still a long way off and given that even Rust WASM was found to usually do worse than JS, I highly doubt Python WASM will outperform it any time soon. Even once it does become worth it, tooling has a long ways to go
> people would rather write Python for ~accomplishing the task they set out to~ than have to muck around with another language entirely.
your argument seems to boil down to: people know Python so they wanna use Python. People can just as easily know JS/TS. If I'm a botanist and I really don't wanna invest too much of my time in learning languages I can choose between Python, the language with all the scientific libraries, and JavaScript, the language of the web. If I choose the former, I'll likely have to bother someone to help me present my work to the web anyways. If in the near future JS also reaches good support for scientific/ml libraries it seems like entering that ecosystem is an obvious advantage. I get to learn the web and access scientific libraries at the same time
Also I don't really find Python all that legible. The language you're describing isn't Python nor JavaScript. It's something like Ruby. Modern javascript has some obvious advantages when it comes to syntactic sugar like arrow functions. It's also easier to teach because you don't need to install anything. Just open up your html file in any browser