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A comment on Ask HN: Will front end development ever move away from JavaScript?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Will front end development ever move away from Ja... by golergka on Sunday March 12, 2017 @05:57AM (#13850041)
I can see benefits of metaprogramming in quite a few very specific tasks - but most of developers who are using Javascript day in and out aren't writing compilers. We're writing business logic. And because this logic comes from human, fuzzy rules, to accurately represent all the corner cases and not drive the code into a globe of insane parameters and checks, one have to get into a mindset of _not_ trying to generalize things.

Thanks for "When Polymorphism Fails" link, it was a wonderful read. I've actually run into such situations a couple of times - but in my experience, you want most of your methods to be statically checked, and only a minority of them to be added and checked dynamically in runtime. May be the solution is to have two different method tables, that look and behave in a different way?

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Re:Ask HN: Will front end development ever move away from Ja... by chubot on Sunday March 12, 2017 @02:16PM (#13852110)
Yes I totally believe that part of the static vs. dynamic debate is different use cases.

However I will point out that probably 80% of the world's top websites are written in dynamic languages -- Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Reddit, etc. (that's not even counting the JavaScript.)

So there is something about that use case and dynamic languages... That's not to say a language is great because it's used widely. But it means that it must be getting something right, and not doing other things too badly.

So yeah all I'm saying is that there's a tradeoff. If there's was no tradeoff, then it would have never have swung toward dynamic languages in the 90's/2000's. It's not like we didn't have statically typed languages before the web. But things swung that way, and it sounds like they're swinging back, with PHP, Python, and JavaScript all getting optional types in one way or another.

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