I notice this time and time again: projects start with a flexible scripting language and a promise that the performance will be sufficient. I mean, JS is pretty performant as scripting languages go and it is hard to think of any language runtimes that get more attention than the browser VMs. And generally, 90% of the things people do will run sufficiently fast in that VM.
Yet projects inevitably get to the stage where a more native representation wins out. I mean, I can't think of a time a high profile project written in a lower level representation got ported to a higher level language.
It makes me think I should be starting any project I have in the lowest level representation that allows me some ergonomics. Maybe more reason to lean into Zig? I don't mean for places where something like Rust would be appropriate. I mean for anything I would consider using a "good enough" scripting language.
It honestly has me questioning my default assumption to use JS runtimes on the server (e.g. Node, deno, bun). I mean, the benefit of using the same code on the server/client has rarely if ever been a significant contributor to project maintainability for me. And it isn't that hard these days to spin up a web server with simple routing, database connectivity, etc. in pretty much any language including Zig or Go. And with LLMs and language servers, there is decreasing utility in familiarity with a language to be productive.
It feels like the advantages of scripting languages are being eroded away. If I am planning a career "vibe coding" or prompt engineering my way into the future, I wonder how reasonable it would be to assume I'll be doing it to generate lower level code rather than scripts.
Yet projects inevitably get to the stage where a more native representation wins out. I mean, I can't think of a time a high profile project written in a lower level representation got ported to a higher level language.
It makes me think I should be starting any project I have in the lowest level representation that allows me some ergonomics. Maybe more reason to lean into Zig? I don't mean for places where something like Rust would be appropriate. I mean for anything I would consider using a "good enough" scripting language.
It honestly has me questioning my default assumption to use JS runtimes on the server (e.g. Node, deno, bun). I mean, the benefit of using the same code on the server/client has rarely if ever been a significant contributor to project maintainability for me. And it isn't that hard these days to spin up a web server with simple routing, database connectivity, etc. in pretty much any language including Zig or Go. And with LLMs and language servers, there is decreasing utility in familiarity with a language to be productive.
It feels like the advantages of scripting languages are being eroded away. If I am planning a career "vibe coding" or prompt engineering my way into the future, I wonder how reasonable it would be to assume I'll be doing it to generate lower level code rather than scripts.