[Python-ideas] Towards harmony with JavaScript?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 12 August 2017 at 06:10, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>
>> > Taking this off the list as it's no longer on topic.
>
>
> not totally -- I'm going to add my thoughts:
>
> 1) If you want a smoother transition between server-side Python and
> in-browser code, maybe you're  better off using one of the "python in the
> browser" solutions -- there are at least a few viable ones.

More experimentally, there's also toga's "web" backend (which allows
you to take an application you developed with the primary intention of
running it as a rich client application on mobile or desktop devices,
and instead publishing it as a Django web application with a
JavaScript frontend).

Essentially, the relationship we see between Python and JavaScript is
similar to the one that exists between Python and C/C++/Rust/Go/etc,
just on the side that sits between the Python code and the GUI, rather
than between the Python code and the compute & storage systems.

As such, there are various libraries and transpilers that are designed
to handle writing the JavaScript *for* you (bokeh, toga,
JavaScripthon, etc), and the emergence of WASM as a frontend
equivalent to machine code on the backend is only going to make the
similarities in those dynamics more pronounced.

In that vein, it's highly *un*likely we'd add any redundant constructs
to Python purely to make it easier for JS developers to use JS idioms
in Python instead of Pythonic ones, but JavaScript *is* one of the
languages we look at for syntactic consistency when considering
potential new additions to Python.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia