Douglas Purdy › Comments

What don't you like about server side JS? - ⓞnor

I don't ythink there's anything fundamentally wrong with it, but I just have no particular desire to use it myself. I'd much rather just keep writing Java with a solid IDE. Now that Scala's got fairly good IDE support, I'm playing with that as well -- it gives me all the tersity and functional tricks I like about js, but with much better tools, error checking, and support for large-scale engineering. - Joel Webber

Server-side JavaScript continues to make little-to-no sense to me. Compare the richness of the libraries, the development tools, and the debugging capabilities of languages like Java, C#, Python, or even Perl or PHP, and ask -- do you *really* love programming in JS so much to forfeit all that? - DeWitt Clinton

Having tried some server-side JS, I'm not convinced it's terribly useful either. Python has very similar features but a more widely used runtime environment and a large number of libraries, and I find that I'm more productive using Python than JS. Writing Java in Eclipse also works for me, as long as I ignore everything ever written about how to write object-oriented code in Java. - Jim Norris

It remembers me my old days (nightmares) with SSJS on Netscape Server... - Didier Girard

Ah yes, LiveScript. We've been here before, haven't we? - Joel Webber

I think that javascript on client and server can male sense in the future with tools and libraries. Imagine having your entire app running like a smalltalk / self environment. Make a change in firebug. Deploy. I wouldn't write it off just yet, but a lot of work to go. I have been writing java again recently and enjoy intellij but hate the amount of code. - Dion Almaer

I definitely like the idea of having my server and client code in the same language and vm, so that I can debug the whole thing at once (but I would say that, would'nt I?). I just think the tools for javascript, python, etc. have a long way to go before that's really feasible. One day, though, who knows... - Joel Webber

Interesting -- I wrote this yesterday... http://douglaspurdy.com/2008... - Douglas Purdy

My beef is that Python, Perl, Ruby, and other dynamic languages all have nice package management, and make it less painful to glue together and management hundreds of third party libraries. JS package management is still ad-hoc. There's no CPAN/pypi/gem style easy of use. Everyone invents their own build system, and the lack of first class module support in JS means everyone has different ways of namespacing JS modules. - Ray Cromwell

After having used SSJS via Rhino for the past two years, I can say un-equivocally that V8 brings welcomed speed improvements, but that a lack of debug-ability (loose-typed language compiled to anonymous classes) quickly trumps most novel reuse and agility arguments that attempt to support the argument for SSJS. JavaScript fails most litmus tests for a language you would want to use if you had to implement a large (100+kloc) project no matter where it is run. - Bill Strathearn

There was JSAN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... but it's now defunct - Adewale Oshineye