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So the basic problem I have with programming right now is TypeScript, Lua, and Python all strike me as being basically the exact same language, with no real reason to pick one over the other; except, I like TS least philosophically, & use TS most in practice for ecosystem reasons

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this perspective is really interesting to me, i guess because i find writing lua incredibly challenging and an entirely different paradigm to other languages, and i don't know how much of that is ecosystem/tooling versus quirks of the language and the core standard library itself

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i suppose it's just a lot of small things like the lack of "real" arrays/lists, or the ergonomics of operating on strings — i just never end up feeling like it's a language i can use for anything even slightly complicated

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Lack of standard threads combined with coroutines not having any kind of standard asynchronous input/output system to go along with it is a huge pain too. It's ridiculously painful to use it for anything unless you have a great framework provided for it by an application.

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JavaScript has gotten drastically better over the years to the point that I consider it a significantly nicer language than Python despite Python syntax being nicer. Python standard library has aged really badly and is full of cruft and outright insecure/broken stuff now too.

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I just wish we could do one big slicing maneuver and cut out all the parts of TS/JS that date from the era when the language wasn't very good. My biggest problems with it look like "too much baggage"

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One of the ugliest things in JavaScript, C#, Java, Kotlin, etc. is their UCS2 strings masquerading as UTF-16. It's particularly bad in JavaScript where it's pretty broken. Huge performance issue for them too since they end up with these bloated multi-representation strings.

1:55 AM · Aug 23, 2021Twitter Web App

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I'm happy that WebAssembly is stubbornly holding the line against carrying forward the JavaScript UCS2 nonsense. It would be pretty nice if they actually got JavaScript to add nice immutable UTF-8 strings with actual Unicode APIs that work properly...

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I had trouble following the whole thing but it kind of seemed like the browsers are denying WebAssembly the features they need to actually have Unicode semantic strings as opposed to UCS2 blobs that sometimes contain strings