1998 called, it wants its java applets back
Java applets idk, but we do have Flash
You can already do this with the power of webassembly.
Look up WebAssembly.
As a python developer and user of websites, please no. The web is already a slow mess and my laptop is already spinning up fans on some websites that really shouldn’t do anything much more complicated than load text and images from a database and display them. CPython would make it exponentially worse. At least pick a sensible performance focused implementation.
Yes. Please. Although something strongly typed would be even better. It’s ridiculous the world runs on a language built in 2 weeks.
It’s also ridiculous to think it’s still the same language that was built in two weeks, like absolutely no work was done in it over time.
I’ll admit I don’t really know the history of the language between then and now. Please don’t tell me the crazy stuff was somehow added later.
If you don’t know the history, why are you so confidently talking about JavaScript being built in 2 weeks?
TIL. Obviously I’ve avoided using it much.
So how does that work? Is there a few implicit conversions that are allowed, but if you really write something weird it will complain?
Yes, it has no implicit conversions like JS or R. It does, however, allow you to not specify the type of a variable and even change it without complaining. Even if you add types these are only hints that won’t generate errors unless you use external type checking (e.g. mypy).
And yet somehow it evolved to become something that will last to the heat death of the universe.
I’ve grown used to it with time, though. Once you know it’s “quirks”, it’s not so bad.
I guess the internet just grew that fast. The first arrival took all and locked everybody in.
Now, we have just two browsers that are widely used, so maybe we do have an opportunity to go back and fix it. Go sounds like it’s a pretty popular choice for statically typed, imperative high-level language.
Honestly, given the context of a browser, Javascript’s “Everything is better than crashing” philosophy does not seem too out-of-place. Yes, the website might break, but at least it would be theoretically usable still.
Yes, a statically typed language would help, but I’d rather not have one that is “these two types are slightly different, fuck you, have a segfault”, but rather one that is slightly more flexible.
Not even “not so bad”, I would say that as a scripting language it’s fantastic. If I’m writing any actually complex code, then static typing is much easier to work with, but if you want to hack together some stuff, python is great.
It also interfaces extremely easily with C++ through pybind11, so for most of what I do, I end up writing the major code base in C++ and a lightweight wrapper in Python, because then you don’t have to think about anything when using the lib, just hack away in dynamically typed Python, and let your compiled C++ do the heavy lifting.
Python is actually mostly strongly typed. Strongly (e.g. can’t use a number as a string without explicitly converting it), but dynamically (can change type of variable at runtime). You probably would prefer a statically typed language and I agree.
Alright, thanks for the help with terminology. I’m a bit confused about changing types at runtime. I thought a compiled or interpreted language stopped having types at runtime, because at that point it’s all in assembly. (In this case of course it’s scripting, which someone pointed out to me elsewhere)
That’s a compiled language, an interpreted language is translated to assembly at runtime, in pythons case: pretty much one line at a time.
Disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge, please correct me where I’m wrong.
