[Tutor] (Convergence && Divergence) || Nonsense

[Mats Wichmann]

On 8/20/22 16:26, Alan Gauld via Tutor wrote:
> On 20/08/2022 19:31, avi.e.gross at gmail.com wrote:

>> Is Python likely to move into some areas like web browsers where JavaScript
>> is a major built-in with JAVA (completely unrelated) also has some ability
>> to be integrated? I heard somewhere they once tried to include some of
>> python in Mosaic but JavaScript sort of won that battle. 
> 
> Deveral languages, including Python, have gone down that route
> but Javascript is now almost alone in that area. The most
> succesful attempt to put Python inside a browser was, rather
> ironically, from Microsoft with their Windows Script Host engine
> which supported JScript and VBScript and Python within Internet
> Explorer. But with the death of WSH so died Python's life in
> a browser. (The all-Python Grail browser hardly counts.)

But PyScript probably does count.  Whether it will gain any *real*
traction, as opposed to curiosity, remains to be seen.  Since it's built
on WebAssembly, and all modern browsers support that, it's at least
capable of being usable everywhere - but will people see any actual need
to do that on a wide scale when Javascript already works so well for them?
As Alan goes on to say in the next bit...

>> So, aside from issues like getting everyone to change, is there anything
>> about Python that would be incompatible from being used in browsers either
>> instead of or alongside JavaScript and be able to access and manipulate the
>> DOM and other allowed services?
> 
> No, but why would you want to? Javascript is filling that
> space and the number of sites using it is vast (even my own
> humble web-page which is almost entirely static HTML uses
> a few script snippets). Any browser therefor must support
> Javacript, anything else is just added bloat with no
> established code base and no guarantee of one forming!

Because of WebAssembly being a W3C Recommendation, the bloat issue isn't
really that big when considering PyScript - or indeed other languages
being able to be used in web pages.

https://www.w3.org/TR/2019/REC-wasm-core-1-20191205/

> It's a bit like trying to replace C in the low-level OS
> and device-driver realm. Rust is having a go at that but
> its a huge struggle. Rust is clearly a "better language"
> for modern computing but the legacy factor is a huge hurdle.

No question - when people have something that works, whether they like
it or not, there's not a huge incentive to switch: companies usually
have enough stuff to work on without rewriting things already deployed
that are proving useful.  There's still an awful lot of COBOL running in
production out there...