There is a lot of innovation in Javascript, especially since the advent of NodeJS. But compared to Python itself, the language has little to be excited about.
What you describe is "innovation" only in a very restricted, local sense. The developments we see within the JavaScript community today are just them catching up with where Python, Perl, C, C++, Java and other languages were years or decades ago.
Non-blocking IO is nothing new. Event-driven network app development frameworks are nothing new. Even using the same language server-side and client-side is nothing new. We were doing that in the 1980s when we wrote our clients and servers in C, and in the 1990s when we used C++, and in the 2000s when we used Java.
When it comes to JavaScript, what's seen as "innovation" is usually just the language and ecosystem desperately trying to catch up with where everybody else was many years in the past.
> When it comes to JavaScript, what's seen as "innovation" is usually just the language and ecosystem desperately trying to catch up with where everybody else was many years in the past.
That's true up to a point, but you're being a bit uncharitable. I'm thinking of a couple of solutions specifically:
- npm [1], which I hear a lot of good things about, while this is definitely not the case about many languages-specific build systems/package managers
- react [2], which is a nice approach to DOM manipulation (if not, maybe, the first of its kind)
And obviously, more and more languages compile to JS nowadays, or are on their way there.
You are making a connection between the advent of NodeJS and the Javascript language. The correct version the way I see it is that the popularity of V8 and NodeJS makes Javascript more than a in-browser scripting language; now people can write both client and server side applications in JS. The latter doesn't require the language to change; the language implementation has been around for years and now people started to do things outside the original norm.
> The latter doesn't require the language to change; the language implementation has been around for years and now people started to do things outside the original norm.
No, but it certainly has pushed for decent dependency management systems, and has led to more complex libraries.
