Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a small language would be irrelevant to JS. The web could benefit from a sound type system built into browsers (aka typescript in the strict mode), but it's not like anybody complains about python lacking the type system, right? What web really needs is a way to write highly modular apps and let the browser download only relevant modules, with caching, prefetching and so on. None of the attempts have worked so…
> anybody complains about python lacking the type system. Well, Python does have strong typing. It's just dynamic, not static, and I've seen enough criticism about it to say that it isn't as unimportant as you make it out to be. JavaScript gets a lot of criticism for having dynamic and weak typing. And I think both forms of criticism are valid, though not everybody agrees, which is fine too.
Re: Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn
#221What makes webapps bloated is the require-at-the-top pattern. Type system makes no difference here. What most devs don't realize is that if their precious app written in holy C plus plus or Java got compiled into a standalone binary that could run on any device inside a browser, it would be a 150 MB mess that wouldn't even boot. All these nice frameworks, libs and utils would need to be downloaded before the app can start. We'll see this soon with wasm, btw.