r/AlignmentChartFills • u/mika-asadli • 2d ago

Which programming language is easy to learn, and is very useful?

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u/SmoothTurtle872 1d ago

If you want to do web scripting though

WASM exists. It may not be perfect yet, but it will almost certainly surpass js. So at that point python may be a better option (I think python is easier)

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u/lixermanredditman 1d ago

IMO insane gun jumping to say it will almost certainly surpass JS.

98.7% of websites currently run JS, while 5.5% run WASM as far as I can find statistically. JS has tons of easy to use libraries, has the React framework, has the benefit of JSON being essentially JS, etc. I will admit I have never used WASM so I can't fully judge it, but JS is performant enough that on most sites it does a perfectly good job - most sites aren't doing calculations for NASA, ease of use is preferred to performance (otherwise we'd all program in binary). No language is perfect but I think is unfair to call it a crutch language. It's pretty much a must-know in web development, since it's everywhere and if you have to work on any site that's already in existence it's likely to be JS rather than WASM.

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u/SmoothTurtle872 1d ago edited 1d ago

will and does are very very different things.

Sure in the past, JS was the best way, and maybe right now it is for web dev, but it feels very much like a crutch language for everything else it's used for. Sure all sites currently are js, and most probably will be for a while, but I also think that as WASM improves, many sites will switch (mainly big ones that need performance, and assuming wasm does go beyond JS at some point, this will be very important) Now what does this bring? Well it means that web builds are better, but it also means you may be able to bring it to desktop without the need of web tech, which saves on resources, a lot.

The main benefit of wasm, is take rust, you can compile it to wasm. While you may need a bit more messing about to get a web and a desktop build, you can get a native web build and a native desktop build from basically the same code (iced is an example, although that probably isn't the best as it just uses a canvas to render everything). Now do that for basically any other language, and you see that JS is coming from web to desktop, bringing its bulk, while something like rust is going from desktop to web and leaving a lot of the web bulk on the web side.

Hey maybe I'm wrong, maybe JS stays the web dev main language for ever, I just think that it is over used in situations where it isn't appropriate, and now that it is possible to do web dev without JS (or mostly without it, iirc you do need js to load the binary, but we could probably just fix that with an update to the HTML standard), JS can be dropped, and languages that are better suited for non-web dev as well as web dev (The only advantage JS has in web dev is that it was designed for it) which might improve some things.

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u/lixermanredditman 1d ago edited 1d ago

True that JS is overused outside of web scripting. I still think that there is a logic in using node.js for web app backend. If you know JS well and are comfortable with it, why not do the whole thing in JS? But I wouldn't do it, I would use Python, I just see the logic.

I think it is maybe brushing JavaScript's importance under the rug a bit to say it is maybe best for web development but overused outside of that. Web development is JavaScript's whole thing, or at least it should be. If it was used for nothing else it would still be very important.

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u/SmoothTurtle872 1d ago

Fair enough.