I find it ridiculous that javascript is the only language available for the web. Almost every other platform, from bare metal to Excel, support multiple languages. It's well past due to untie the browser from a mandated language.

Well, that's largely the problem that WebAssembly is aiming to solve. Progress has been significant.

You've been living under a rock :)

People are using a variety languages that compile to JS on the frontend for many years. Elm, TypeScript, ClojureScript, Reason, Scala.js, Fable, etc. In fact even modern JS is often compiled into backward compatible legacy-JS these days.

WebAssembly is porting the C machine model to the web, so for the foreseeable future JS is still going to be a better runtime for most GCd languages.

Why not just use Django or Flask? Python web dev is great because you do have access to so many of these incredible scientific libraries like Pandas, etc.

I don't know anything about web dev, so maybe it's a stupid question, but you still need javascript for the front end, right? You can't build the front and back end development completely in python?

I think they're implying that you use a Python web framework and server-side rendering.

Right now, reasonably you can't. Maybe with Pyodide you may soon be able to.

Those work great for the "back end" but don't cover the aspects of the in-browser "front end" unless you do everything on the server side.

the problem is now you have to rewrite your entire application around the web stack. That's a huge impedence mismatch. Taken to extreme, you end up with Pandas.

Python no, but there's a lot of languages that have a JS transpiler, like ClojureScript, BuckleScript, Fantom, Nim, Haxe, etc. And of course, C and C++ such as what this project did.

Actually, it seems there are some Python transpilers as well, though they don't seem as supported as what I listed.

Anyways, my point is there's quite a lot of options on top of JavaScript. And for web dev, transpilers are the way to go, because bundle size matters for page loads, so options like this, where you compile the whole interpreter into a bundle aren't valid for that. For example, I use ClojureScript for web dev, and it works great. There are options to escape the shackles of having to write JS.

There's Brython. https://brython.info/

I worked with a researcher a few years ago who used it to do somewhat complex frontend presentations.

But why? Just learn a little javascript. Its fun.

It’s never learn a little JavaScript.

It’s learn webpack, learn parcel, learn react, learn vue, learn typescript, learn redux, learn npm, learn yarn etc etc.

If it was python, at least it wouldn’t change every three months.

Python has spoiled every other programming language for me. I look at their syntax and it makes me sad.

It was available as browser plugin since the early days, it just went nowhere.

If I remember correctly, ActiveState was the one offering it.