You’re right about python being the same. Python doesn’t have a mature alternative to Typescript that launches it into having best-in-class type handling.

There’s so much that my C# devs can’t do with its horrible type system that Typescript “just does better”. At compile-time at least.

I used to work on a hybrid typescript/python product (some services js, some TS, some python), and the TS stuff was just faster-running, easier to iterate, and better. And story-point allocations consistently showed that for an excess of 20 devs working on those codebases.

As for pip/easy_install vs npm/yarn/pnpm… I’m curious what you think pip does well that yarn/npm doesn’t? I’ll say in my work experience there’s more/better enterprise private repository/cache support for node modules than for python modules. Using npm security databases alongside “known good versioning” allows a team of even 100 developers to safely add libraries to projects with no fear of falling out of corporate compliance regulations. I’ve never seen that implemented with pip

even though I am guessing that with a better webassembly support of the browsers

Considering V8 overcame python in benchmarks nearly a decade ago, I’m not sure even some miraculous webassembly environment would put python faster than javascript in the browser of all places.

V8 does not quite compete with the big guns in the space (C, Rust, Go), but now that it’s only 2-4x slower than C++, it’s created this niche of “almost hardcore fast” for javascript that is just unlikely to be dethroned any time soon.

People fail to quite get how many leaps and bounds V8 has taken in the last 10-12 years. Javascript’s reputation of being “scripting language slow” is simply no longer the case and hasn’t been for an entire Era in software terms. Reasonably-written Javascript is now often faster than heavily-tuned Python, and well-written javascript is faster than reasonably-written C++. It’s not necessarily fair (like comparing modern solar to nuclear, with the absurd amount of money that’s gone into solar research), but I don’t see it changing any time soon.

So bizarre how life experience drives attitude. I’m one of those who has worked in a dozen languages, and Javascript (well, Typescript now) simply wins out for me. I run a C# team right now (have been for nearly a decade), and I can say as much as I love my job I hate the language. We get less done with slower code and with more bugs and more (very talented) people than the little $10M operation 4 of us did with node.js a couple jobs ago.

And as an aftethought since language and tooling are different topics… the ops toolchains for javascript are so much better than anything I’ve worked in any other language. Code released to production often ends up costing us less (dollar value) in the time to deploy, and then less per-user and per-hour.

I know a lot of C# diehards and I respect their passion. I just cannot relate to their experience. And I can say that with over a decade of experience in many of the languages in the original meme.

It was when better sandboxing came out and the only valid complaints about javascript became invalid.

I was there. It was a good time.

Delphi was pretty good. But it was also fairly persistent.