Avoiding JavaScript like the plague that it is, is not unique to AI engineers.

-Someone who has written a ton of JS over the past... almost 30 years now.

Choosing Python over JavaScript is one of the more perplexing decisions I've seen.

It's not so perplexing when you understand that Python has long had the best ecosystem of libraries for data science and ML, from which the current wave of AI stuff was born. There are plenty of reasons to dunk on Python, but the reality is lots of people were getting real work done with it in the run up to where we are today.

There are choices at multiple levels.

Yes, today’s ML engineer has practically no choice but to use Python, in a variety of settings, if they want to be able to work with others, access the labor market without it being an uphill battle, and most especially if they want to study AI / ML at a university.

But there were also the choices to initially build out that ecosystem in Python and to always teach AI / ML in Python. They made sense logistically, since universities largely only teach Python, so it was a lowest-common-denominator language that allowed the universities to give AI / ML research opportunities to everyone, with absolutely no gatekeeping and with a steadfast spirit of friendly inclusion (sorry, couldn’t resist the sarcastic tangent). I can’t blame them for working with what they had.

But now that the techniques have grown up and graduated to form multibillion-dollar companies, I’m hopeful that industry will take up the mantle to develop an ecosystem that’s better suited for production and for modern software engineering.

When it comes to modern Python, the only thing that can make it not production-ready is it being slow. Given that people in machine learning are using Python as a glue language for AI/ML libraries, this negligibly impacts their workflow.

How good is JS interop with C/C++/BLAS? That's the basic stepping stone, I think. If you cannot make something in JavaScript that can compete with numpy there's little chance that things will change anytime soon.

I don’t know the details as specifically, since I haven’t been able to justify investing my efforts in the non-flagship ecosystem within the TensorFlow project after it previously added its Swift version to the Google Graveyard, but TensorFlow.js is doing something in this direction for the Node.js version. This info is at: https://www.tensorflow.org/js/guide/nodejs

“Like the CPU package, the module is accelerated by the TensorFlow C binary. But the GPU package runs tensor operations on the GPU with CUDA.”

They note that these operations are synchronous, so using them will sacrifice some of JavaScript’s effectiveness at asynchronous event processing. This is not different from Python when you are training or serving a model. JavaScript’s strengths would shine brighter when coordinating agents / building systems that coordinate models.

Oh yeah. Personally I also try to avoid Python but as the rest of this thread covers it's pretty deeply rooted in ML/AI so I think we're stuck with it - at least for a while.

JavaScript has known issues with math. It should be avoided for that reason alone, no?

This is the way.

JS is a terrible language to begin with, and bringing it to the backend was a mistake. TS doesn’t change the fact that the underlying language is still a pile of crap.

So, like many, I’ll write anything—Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, Elixir, F#—before touching JS or TS with a ten-foot pole.

This doesn't contribute much to the discussion.

Use whatever language works well for you and the task at hand, but many enjoy fullstack JS/TS.

> Python, Ruby

It's 2025, Node.js has been around since 2009, yet these languages' still use C-based interpreters by default, and their non-standard JIT alternatives are still much worse than V8.

Define “worse.” V8 is a runtime; it can’t fix JavaScript’s terrible design. V8 is amazing but runs a crappy language. Both Ruby and Python were created by actual language designers, and that still shows even decades after their original conception.

You think Python is a better language than TS?

Anything at this point.

Python is terrible in the age of LLMs because type checking doesn't work properly.

Python is basically the only language that’s used to train the models.

Sure, the libs are mostly written in C/C++, but all of them have first-class support for Python and oftentimes Python only. Serving the model is a different story and you can use whatever language to do so.

As someone who has worked in the DS realm for an extended period of time, I can tell you Python has practically zero competition when it comes to data wrangling and training models. There are plenty of contenders when it comes to serving the models or building “agents.”

As for type checking, yeah, it sucks big time. TS is a much better type system than the bolted-on hints in Python. But it’s still JS at the end of the day. All the power of V8, a zillion other runtimes, and TS gets marred by a terribly designed language.

Why is JS particularly good for agents?

This is a specious argument. It's event-driven because it has callbacks?

“Specious” meaning what exactly?

Because it integrates great with browsers and people know the language already for node.js and the packages in npm can work for both?

A uniform language and ecosystem has been the siren song of JS for over a decade and I've yet to see it work out in any meaningful way.

Use whatever you like.

I mean, what else do you use to run things in the browser?

Pouchdb. Hypercore (pear). It’s nice to be able to spin up JS versions of things and have them “just work” in the most widely deployed platform in the world.

TensorflowJS was awesome for years, with things like blazeface, readyplayer me avatars and hallway tile and other models working in realtime at the edge. Before chatgpt was even conceived. What’s your solution, transpile Go into wasm?

Agents can work in people’s browsers as well as node.js around the world. Being inside a browser gives a great sandbox, and it’s private on the person’s own machine too.

This was possible years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpSzT_c7_UI&t=10m30s

> what else do you use to run things in the browser?

I do my best to run as little in the browser as possible. Everything is an order of magnitude simpler and faster to build if you do the bulk of things on a server in a language of your choice and render to the browser as necessary.

I was wondering if there was something particular about AI, but that's just the standard reason people give to use JS for anything.