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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

(nolanlawson.com)
160 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.219s | source
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jpalawaga ◴[20 Oct 24 21:53 UTC] No.41898791[source]▶
Anyone who has done a programming contest, advent of code, etc knows that the language doesn’t matter so much as your algorithm.

Yes, the language can bring a nice speed up, or might give you better control of allocations which can save a lot of time. But in many cases, simply picking the correct algorithm will deliver you most of the performance.

As someone who doesn’t JavaScript a lot, I’d definitely prefer a tool written in go and available on brew over something I need to invoke node and its environment for.

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tyree731 ◴[20 Oct 24 21:56 UTC] No.41898816[source]▶
Lots of very smart people have worked very hard on Python tools written in Python, yet the rust rewrites of those tools are so much faster. Sometimes it really is the programming language.
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bsder ◴[20 Oct 24 23:06 UTC] No.41899226[source]▶
> Lots of very smart people have worked very hard on Python tools written in Python, yet the rust rewrites of those tools are so much faster.

So?

Some tool got written and did its job sufficiently well that it became a bottleneck worth optimizing.

That's a win.

"Finishing the task" is, by far, the most difficult thing in programming. And the two biggest contributors to that are 1) simplicity of programming language and 2) convenience of ecosystem.

Python and Javascript are so popular because they tick both boxes.

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tyree731 ◴[21 Oct 24 00:03 UTC] No.41899545[source]▶
Don’t disagree about finishing the task, but personally I don’t find more performant languages any less productive for the sort of programming I tend to do.
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bsder ◴[21 Oct 24 00:42 UTC] No.41899723[source]▶
Congratulations on being a programming god. This discussion isn't for you.

From my point of view, I'm happy if I can convince my juniors to learn a scripting language. Okay? I don't care which one--any one. I'd prefer that they learn one of the portable ones but even PowerShell is fine.

I have seen sooooo many junior folks struggle for days to do something that is 10 lines in any scripting language.

Those folks who program but don't know a scripting language far outnumber the rest of us.

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1. fredrikholm ◴[21 Oct 24 06:32 UTC] No.41901234[source]▶
> I have seen sooooo many junior folks struggle for days to do something that is 10 lines in any scripting language.

> Those folks who program but don't know a scripting language far outnumber the rest of us.

What domain are you in? This sounds like the complete inverse of every company I've ever worked at.

Entire products are built on Python, Node ect, and the time after the initial honeymoon phase (if it exists) is spent retrofitting types on top in order to get a handle, any handle, on the complexity that arises without static analysis and compile time errors.

At around the same time, services start OOM'ming left and right, parallellism=1 becomes a giant bottleneck, JIT fails in one path bringing the service performance down an order of magnitude every now and then etc...

> Congratulations on being a programming god. This discussion isn't for you.

On the behalf of mediocre developers everywhere, a lot of us prefer statically typed languages because we are mediocre; I cannot hold thousands of implicit types and heuristics in my head at the same time. Luckily, the type system can.