The author mentioned transpiling other languages to Javascript and Javascript to Lua.
Personally, I much, much prefer working in Clojurescript to Javascript. Once my dev environment is setup, and I am rolling, there is not much inconvenience or build delays at all. My setup is editing in IntelliJ (both Clojure and Clojurescript), one clojure repl, and one lein autobuild task to keep the generated Javascript up to date, given about a one second delay.
Javascript is not such a bad language, I use it directly when doing meteor.js development, but I think the future is better languages like Clojure, Haskell, Scala, etc. transpiling to Javascript.
> Javascript is not such a bad language, I use it directly when doing meteor.js development, but I think the future is better languages like Clojure, Haskell, Scala, etc. transpiling to Javascript.
Honestly I think this has been the 'future' for a long time now, and I still don't see it happening anytime soon. Clojurescript as a language was announced in mid 2011, NodeJS came on the seen in late 2009. Both were languages never or barely used in their respective domains (server vs client side), but NodeJS has clearly had way more adoption on the server side then Clojurescript ever has had on the client.
Unless we get significant browser buy in for other languages (aka not just Chrome) and much better tooling I don't think any transpiled language is ever going to go beyond the minor niches they fill. And I say all this as a huge Scala fanboy, having used it for years in a professional way, and being very interested in ScalaJS. There simply isn't a language that has the buy in and following Javascript has been able to develop.
I can't wait for the time to be able to write in javascript native code to run on Android or iOS. Maybe a future TypeScript would be the solution for this but it is not too late to remind people that transpiling is a two way street.
Is your Javascript VM not already in native code when you're running Javascript on these platforms? Or are you suggesting that the instruction set for the chips on these devices "be pure javascript"?
That's what I meant by native development in iOS/Android
javascript-to-java and javascript-to-obj-c transpiling
I'm fully aware of the existense of alternatives out there like PhoneGap, Ionic ..etc but I'm envisioning a future where you could write in javascript mostly everything you could do in other languages and transpilers take care of the rest.
Both of those platforms have perfectly reasonable languages available (Java & Swift or ObjC), why would you use JavaScript over them?
Cross platform UI has AFAICT never worked, so you won't be able to reuse code from one platform on another, or is that what you intend to do? In that case you could still transpile from either Java or Swift...
Personally, I much, much prefer working in Clojurescript to Javascript. Once my dev environment is setup, and I am rolling, there is not much inconvenience or build delays at all. My setup is editing in IntelliJ (both Clojure and Clojurescript), one clojure repl, and one lein autobuild task to keep the generated Javascript up to date, given about a one second delay.
Javascript is not such a bad language, I use it directly when doing meteor.js development, but I think the future is better languages like Clojure, Haskell, Scala, etc. transpiling to Javascript.
All that said, that was a nice article!