Comments on: The server-side Javascript meme

By: Conrad Barajas

Conrad Barajas — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:55:44 +0000

Good article. I’ve bookmarked this website so I can follow your follow-ups. Thanks for taking the energy to share this.

By: Arneberg

Arneberg — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:29:11 +0000

@ekiben

What's stoppibg you from using CoffeeScript on the client wnd the server?;

By: neimado

neimado — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:35:06 +0000

Any article about server-side javascript that does not mention Microsoft Jscript does a disservice to itself, and the community. I have been developing back-end systems in JScript for a long, long, LONG TIME. It is as robust as any other server-side javascript solution. JScript.NET is powerful, and easy to code. Code re-use between front-end and back-end has been no problem at all.

By: M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:00:48 +0000

There are too many programming languages already. None of them is perfect, so people feel the need to create yet another language, yet another community, etc. Eventually, you just have to say, “Please, no more!” Server-side JavaScript has me shouting, “PLEASE! NO MORE! I’M BEGGING, DOWN ON MY KNEES!”

There are half a dozen or so languages that people actually use! PHP (4 and 5), C/C++, Java, browser-side JavaScript, Ruby 1.8, Python 2.x, Perl 5.10. Why do we need PHP 6? Perl 6? Ruby 1.9 and 2.0? Python 3? Go? Haskell? Scala? Smalltalk? Erlang? C#? For crying out loud, most of the interpreters / run times are written in C, if only long enough to bootstrap up to a “higher-level” language.

By: eliben

eliben — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:38:16 +0000

@Paul,

Nothing, I guess. But if I’d take this path I’d pick Pyjamas, since I know and love Python and see no reason for learning yet another language (CoffeeScript).

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:32:27 +0000

> First of all, further fragmentation of the server-side development community.

What, really? What’s another option to write server side applications going to do to this “community”? You can already use virtually any language you want to write web applications, actually.

> While it has a good core in it , there are also a lot of quirks and design faults.

Yeah, like many languages.

> Oh, and there’s a ton of horrible code out there that just gets copy-pasted from project to project.

How is this any fault of JavaScript itself?

By: Paul Barry

Paul Barry — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:20:49 +0000

@eliben

What’s stopping you from using CoffeeScript on the client and the server?

By: eliben

eliben — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:40:15 +0000

@blackdog & Paul,

I’ve seen CoffeeScript mentioned before, but it kind-of beats the point. Javascript is a strange “assembly layer” – a true VM would be much better (i.e. Parrot, JVM) – as long as CoffeeScript isn’t popular on the client it won’t be popular on the server, and using it for the server with JS itself for the client kind-of beats the one-language point.

By: Paul Barry

Paul Barry — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:53:51 +0000

I think CoffeeScript (http://coffeescript.org) takes care of most of your concerns. If you program strictly in CoffeeScript, you can avoid the quirky side of JavaScript and use a language that is more clear and concise, like Ruby/Python. CoffeeScript *is* JavaScript: The Good Parts, with sugar on top

By: blackdog

blackdog — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:01:51 +0000

Javascript is far from ideal particularly if your fond of static typing, however, javascript as the “assembler of the web” is targeted by many compilers/translators, my favourite being haxe, http://www.haxe.org.

There’s also Coffeescript, Clojurescript, Parenscript; the point being, a server platform like Node.js can be leveraged even if JS is not your favourite language – as I’m doing in my hxNode project for haxe.