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It's pretty interesting that while both languages still receive new features, Java seems to stay ahead of JavaScript:

- Java has long had a modern replacement for Date, while JavaScript's recently standardized Temporal API still isn't supported in Safari.

- Java has switch expressions, while JavaScript, despite its Scheme influence, does not.

- And now Java is getting value objects, while JavaScript's equivalent tuples & records proposal has been withdrawn.[0]

JavaScript was not developed as a fork of Java, but much of its basic syntax still resembles Java, so I think it's fair to compare them.

[0]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record-tuple



I personally would never compare the two. Someone said: java to JavaScript is like car to carpet. And I completely agree with that.


Reminds me of one of C++'s talks from Andrei Alexandrescu:

"std::allocator is to allocation what std::vector is to vexation".

There was another transparency inside:

"std::allocator is to allocation what alligator is to allegation".


> Someone said: java to JavaScript is like car to carpet.

You mean the sibling who commented five minutes before you?


The saying has been in use since at least 2018, so I think "someone" is accurate.

https://www.keycdn.com/support/difference-between-java-and-j...


as ham is to hamster


as ant is to antidisestablishmentarianism


Java is to JavaScript what a Car is to Carpet. Very different beasts, though a lot of V8 work was inspired by Hotspot that's just because of common VM patterns not the syntax of the languages.


> JavaScript was not developed as a fork of Java, but much of its basic syntax still resembles Java, so I think it's fair to compare them.

It's absolutely irrelevant to compare these two languages. Calling the former "Javascript" was just a marketing trick.


> It's absolutely irrelevant to compare these two languages. Calling the former "Javascript" was just a marketing trick.

Playing devil's advocate: back when you still could use Java in the browser, you could use Javascript to script your Java applets.


The original version was Scheme, but they made it look like Java for marketing, too.


> Java has long had a modern replacement for Date, while JavaScript's recently standardized Temporal API still isn't supported in Safari.

i think Temporal API added in latest preview version of safari.

https://webkit.org/blog/18182/release-notes-for-safari-techn...


JavaScript still doesn't have proper integers.


The withdrawn of that proposal made me so sad. It would be amazing for JS as language, specially with certain use cases.


I've been annoyed too by the lack of Temporal support in Safari. It's supposedly behind a --useTemporal flag, but I've never been able to get flags to work even when launching the binary directly, and I can't find anything in developer options or feature flags settings either so like. Does it even exist at all??


It is enabled by default in STP, so presumably it will launch alongside the 27 releases.

Note Temporal was in the Ecmascript 2026 release back in March.




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