FizzyOrange

I don't think so - Javascript doesn't have to ship its language runtime so it will always have a size advantage.

Interesting, so that's sort of customising the image somehow? Does it use an overlay FS or something?

Hmmm I guess this kind of makes sense - most distros push Gnome above KDE (probably because it doesn't look like this - where's Tantacrul when you need him?). On the other hand, there's already Kubuntu...

I'm a bit skeptical about immutable distros too. What if I want to install a package that isn't already installed and isn't available as a Flatpak/Snap? Seems like it's going to run in similar issues to everything else that tries to wade upstream against the bad decisions of the existing Linux packaging zeitgeist, e.g. how Nix has to install everything in one root-owned directory because nobody cares about portable installation.

That's cool, but in my experience if you get to the OOM killer then 80% of the time it's too late and your system is basically dead. My laptop hard reboots most of the time when this happens.

Hopefully it works with the early-OOM hacks.

I have 32 GB but it's not enough. Try opening 8 instances of VSCode, Firefox and Chrome with a few dozen tabs. Unfortunately my laptop doesn't support 64 GB of RAM.

The is operator is for identity, not equality. Your example is just using it weirdly in a way that most people wouldn’t do.

The + operator is for numbers or strings, not arrays. Your example is just using it weirdly in a way that most people wouldn't do.

I'm not defending Javascript's obviously terrible behaviour there. Just pointing out that Python has obviously terrible behaviours too. In both cases the solution is "don't do that, and use static analysis to make sure you don't do it accidentally".

Sometimes I meet junior developers who have only ever used javascript, and it’s like (to borrow another contentious nerd topic) like meeting someone who’s only ever played D&D talking about game design.

Yeah I think you can generalise that to "have only ever used one language". I would say Python and Javascript are pretty close on the "noob level". By which I mean if you meet someone who has only ever written C++, Java, or Rust or whatever they're going to be a class above someone who has only ever written Python or Javascript.

Why would you use the is operator like that?

Why would you add two arrays like that?

Do you not use containers when you deploy

No because I am not using Python to make a web app. That's not the only thing people write you know...

JavaScript is so bad you’ve resorted to using a whole other language: Typescript

Well yeah. Typescript isn't really a new language. It's just type annotations for JavaScript (except for enums; long story). But yes JavaScript is pretty bad without Typescript.

But Typescript isn't a cop-out like Docker is.

But the language it’s built on top of it is extremely warty. Maybe we agree on that.

Yeah definitely. You need to ban the warts but Typescript & ESLint do a pretty good job of that.

I mean I would still much rather write Dart or Rust but if I had to pick between Typescript and Python there's absolutely no way I'd pick Python (unless it was for AI).

Well, indeed. Unfortunately there are still a fair number of them. The situation is definitely improving at least.

In fairness that approach hasn't really worked in other languages. It was so unpopular in C++ that they actually removed the feature, which is almost unheard of. Java supports it too but it's pretty rarely used in my experience. The only place I've seen it used is in Android. It's unpopular enough there that Kotlin doesn't support it.

I have never seen a single C++ codebase do that. It helps but it's not a practical full solution.

I dunno if you're being deliberately obtuse, but just in case you really did miss his point: the fact that type hints are optional (and not especially popular) means many libraries don't have them. It's much more painful to use a library without type hints because you lose all of their many benefits.

This obviously isn't a problem in languages that require static types (Go, Rust, Java, etc..) and it isn't a problem with Typescript because static types are far more popular in JavaScript/Typescript land so it's fairly rare to run into a library that doesn't have them.

And yeah you can just not use the library at all but that's just ignoring the problem.

A sane language, you say.

Yes:

Operator '+' cannot be applied to types 'number[]' and 'number[]'.

We're talking about Typescript here. Also I did say that it has some big warts, but you can mostly avoid them with ESLint (and Typescript of course).

Let's not pretend Python doesn't have similar warts:

>>> x = -5
>>> y = -5
>>> x is y
True
>>> x = -6
>>> y = -6
>>> x is y
False
>>> x = -6; y = -6; x is y
True

>>> isinstance(False, int)
True

>>> [f() for f in [lambda: i for i in range(10)]]
[9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9]

There's a whole very long list here. Don't get be wrong, Python does a decent job of not being crazy. But so does Typescript+ESLint.

I’ve worked professionally in python for several years and I don’t think it’s ever caused a serious problem. Everything’s in docker so you don’t even use venv.

"It's so bad I have resorted to using Docker whenever I use Python."