JavaScript vs Python: What's the Difference?
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- čas přidán 12. 06. 2024
- I've often come across comparisons between different programming languages, and one that always seems to surface is the debate of JavaScript versus Python. Today, I'd like to dive into these two languages and explore their core philosophical differences.
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🔖 Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:35 History and syntax
1:22 Object-oriented programming
2:38 How quickly can you get started?
4:49 Multithreading
5:45 Type system
8:12 Type annotations
10:01 Final thoughts
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Hey Arjan, thanks for the great content as always! Ive got a recommendation for a video series, a 2 parter where in the first video you pose a challenge and in the second reveal a solution. Honestly, one of the biggest hinderances in my journey learning python is having something to code, i would greatly appreciate content like this if it is doable!
Type hints in python is super great for making the IDE work more smoothly.
lol
one is an awesome, well thought out, well designed programming language --- the other is javascript
Python is a scripting language, not a programming language. It's not compiled, it's interpreted.
@@AnfecsIan So is JS.
@@AnfecsIan JavaScript is also interpreted. But both can be JIT compiled and the most popular python runtime, CPython is less optimised than most popular JavaScript runtime (V8). Whether a language is considered a scripting language or programming language does not really matter if both are Turing-complete.
@@AnfecsIanThis distinction is somewhere between meaningless and wrong. Python has pre-installed runtime, like Java. Both languages compile their code to bytecode, executed by a virtual machine. So we'd say Java is scripting language too? But C and C++ compile to low-level virtual machine code which is then ran in similarly interpreted manner, tho obviously more optimized. This virtual machine interpreter however is packaged with the executable, so perhaps that's the difference, Java is a scripting language but C is not because of whether interpreter is packaged with the compile target?
@@AnfecsIan it's "Scripting Vs Compiled Programming Languages", even though the line is getting blurred.
The distinction you're drawing is analogous to "Red vs Colour"(if those blur lines in the former comparison are not considered)
Nice one. This is an "essential" comparison -- i.e. a comparison focusing on the essence of each language. Probably the best language vs language comparison I've come across. I would even say this is essential viewing for the (casual) polyglot like myself :)
Glad you liked it!
You took some shots at Javascript's deployment process there lol. There's really nothing stopping you from installing Nodejs + any editor and being able to develop almost anything you want with just that. Extra goodies (might) require more setup but that's not much different from other languages.
It felt good to vent 😁.
@@ArjanCodes that's a universal emotion among developers :D
so weird. made it seem way more complicated than it is. Web app building vs the language.
With reference to your intro joke can I just say I've been stuck in PHP centred jobs for something like 25 years now... and two of my favourite programming channels are yours and Matt Pocock's... One that covers Python and one that covers TypeScript. That's how much I love PHP.
Hello Arjan. Thanks for the nice code roast and refactor example.
I have a question: To uphold Law of Demeter, should in test functions, lines "assert game.grid.grid == expected_state " also be refactored into "assert game.raw_grid == expected_state" ?
Also, conceptually notions of "grid" and "state" are mixed, which could be confusing at first glance.
Great video, you should do a course on Typescript and on how to use type annotations for Python.
It'd be great to see you covering data structures, algorithms and coding challenges in those languages too.
Hey, FoxPro 2.6 for MS-DOS vs Cobol, do you remember ?
I am going into cloud developer course (AWS). i would like to know which to concentrate on. Python or JavaScript?
Please advise.
I kinda disagree with the "hard" deployment of python.
You can create packages und pack those into a .whl, while declaring all dependencies.
Then you just can pip install said wheel and pip will install all dependencies for you.
Getting to the .whl can be kinda tricky at times, but when you got it right it's really easy to distribute.
-> developer does the "hard" part of creating the wheel, consumer does the easy pip install
You can even specify entry points in your .whl so after installing it the consumer can run your script/program with a simple cli prompt
Everyone can open a browser and using the inspect tools we can start typing Javascript syntax right away via the console.
so essentially we only need a browser in order to start writing JS code.
I started my programming journey with Python, but now I love JS as well especially their awesome dataviz libraries...nothing in Python comes close to the flexibility of JS dataviz.
Tell this man.... JavaScript is far better 😂
Would be great if you could compare Julia vs Python and Mojo vs Python.
Mojo Jojo!
Isn't Mojo still closed beta?
Mojo is a superset of Python, meaning... it is a simple-to-optimize solution that add ways for the processing to reach "blazingly fast" speed.
Hi Arjan, thanks again for your sound minded comment on these prevelant programming languages. As Javascript runs on most things it has to take at least some of our mind share, regardless how some may wish for other things that are 'better' to take its place. Python was something I avoided previous to Y2K due to its having 'tabs' rather than { } brackets. I was so different a person back then. Your comments around the amount of effort required to get things working with JS is very poignant and it made me think of fireship and others who liken this sort of thing to 'Stockholm syndrome' in that we are held captive to a situation and go on to 'like' the jumps and hoops we have to go through just to get started, let alone to get the job done. Tooling is key I think and picking the right tools is crtical to succeding, in particluar with JS.
There is now Bun JavaScript runtime, this gives a better starting environment as there are many additional features like TypeScript support without installing a package. I have used both and there is a use case for each and like any other programming language, they all fail to be the best solution for all problems.
Hi Arjan, thank you for nice summary. I think it is fair to mention Mojo when you mentioned TypeScript as super set of JS. It is not quite fair to comparing pure python with TS. :D python typing is build into python. TS is not build into JS. I hope Mojo will be next step up for python community.
Really appreciate the nod to the difficulties with both languages, I have experience in both, and I believe they both have their own uses. Python for data science projects and quick CICD-related code bases is a no-brainer. Javascript for the web seems to be a no-brainer as well because of the browser connotation and everything being JS on the front-end EOD anyway.
Wish you did more targeted examples of what FLASK vs ... or REACT vs... or things of that nature, as the libraries are ultimately what give JS or PY their real advantage imho.
Thank you. Your videos are very informative! It is awesome.
You’re welcome - glad you find the content helpful!
Thanks for the episode, very high level as always :)
I'm impressed that you didn't hit the glass of water that's on the table btw
hahhaha! Almost ;)
Hi Arjan, I was researching the best way for creating a very simple CRUD app using vanilla JS, HTML5, CSS3 & Database (PostgreSQL). Was debating on the simplest solution. Either JS with SQL or Python with SQL. I reached the timeline (2:38 ->++) & hearing what you had to say cleared things up for me quickly. The amount of complexity with JavaScript the way you describe it sounds like a nightmare. Thank you for clearing things up I decided to use Python with SQLite3 and keep my project very simple!
Do not Mind this man... JavaScript is flexible that no man will claim Mastery but very good for CRUD.. all these languages use JavaScript API. JavaScript is secure for complex applications and good for online data structures and Algorithms. with JavaScript, you have powers to personalize your code... hackers will not understand your code..,
@@abahiduh3246 Well, unfortunately I ended up with an ORM and it was the worse decision. I had linked an ORM to an SQLite3 and found out to modify the database was a nightmare. I ended up quitting the project. BUT my next project will be web based so I think I will be going to JavaScript route, thanks abahiduh.
I've been trying to create a Somewhat-Python-To-JavaScript converter that accepts tkinter and many of the most commonly used modules and so far... needs to be single-paged... that way it is like having the best of both worlds. Also... this project can constantly be improved by a Python Community.
Could you compare Python with Go? And how to combine them in microservices
What do you mean with combine? Microservices run autonomously from each other and communicate for example via HTTP. HTTP is language independent. You can combine Java, Rust, Go, Python Services easily :
@@codingcrashkurse6429 Yes, yes, I know. I mean lately many data science applications implement some microservices in Python and others in Go. The use of Python is logical, but I would like to know more about the benefits of Go in some parts of these applications.
@@diegol_116 Having worked in both, there are some fundamental differences. Go is a programming language that is compiled down into Plan9 assembly code. It runs on your machine with a small runtime that provides garbage collection for memory and powers some features like reflection. Python is an interpreted language. Python has a global interpreter lock which prevents it from doing work in parallel without spanning to other processes. Go is designed for concurrency, and it has a lightweight green thread model called goroutines. It uses less RAM, which can lower costs in the cloud.
The end product: Python is great for prototypes, most services, data science, etc. Go thrives if you need to do a lot almost at once, but it is more verbose. A Python server may handle a 5k requests/second, a Go server can often handle 25k+ requests/second. But, there’s a lot of gotchas. Most applications have bottlenecks other than the language, like the database. You also probably deploy your app to many servers and load balance between them. So, in practice, the performance of the language usually doesn’t matter as much. Your architecture and development velocity matter most. Python is often quicker to develop in, and so that’s more valuable to many teams. But, if you have performance critical workflows and need strong compute performance with concurrency and low RAM, Go may be the sweet spot. It’s important to not prematurely optimize though.
I get the desire to take a cheap shot at js but, honestly, it makes the whole video sound pretty biased towards Python. All you need to do to write a HelloWorld in js is to press F12 in a browser. No frameworks required. Comparing the full web dev stack with simple python scripting is really apples to oranges.
In JS, there is a "the show must go on, it's the web" weltanschauung. This is why JS has weak typing and allows errors to pass silently. If you do something wrong in JS, more often than not your app simply fails to work, and there is no error messaging. But the browser chugs on.
3:48 subtitle says "course" instead of "CORS". this might sound pretty deceiving for a beginner imo, maybe it's just me, but I'd expect beginners to find the video and use the subtitles
Thanks for letting me know! I'll fix this typo :)
I really love Python type annotations and docstrings and all that -- the code becomes self-documenting (and I made a little tool called autodox that extracts all that information and outputs a markdown documentation file). However, all of those type annotations get obliterated as soon as you use a decorator to wrap a function/method, which is pretty annoying. Just encountered this today after writing a simple hooks library, and I have yet to figure out an effective workaround.
I believe this kind of issues are handled by functools.wraps decorator (or equivalently, functools.update_wrapper). Of course it introduces a slight overhead, but gets the job done, at least in my use cases.
What task would you be performing in Javascript or Python that would require muti-threading?
You use the term multi-threading, but I am going to assume that you meant concurrent processing. Please let me know if I got that wrong.
Any project that solves for competing consumers in a problem domain where it makes sense for them to run on the same host are typically enabled with some form of concurrent processing; whether that be via threads or processes.
But only as a performance optimization step where needed.
Think go routines or asynchronous Blocks in .NET TPL Data Flow.
Both Javascript and Python offer multiple mechanisms to accomplish similar solutions. But it is not wise to start with such a design. Let it emerge instead.
I personally use concurrency in Python to utilize more CPU cores in processing slow functions.
In JavaScript it is mostly useful for keeping the main function loop running while processing slow functions. If you for example have a web page, and you need to do some processing on the front-end, the page will freeze for the duration of the processing if it is done in the main thread. If you open a new thread and get the result back with a promise, the page won't freeze.
Whether you like Python or JavaScript really depends on your preferences.
I like JavaScript/TypeScript better than Python because
- data structures are just simpler in modern JavaScript if you understand the concept of everything is an object.
- I don't like JavaScript's unawareness of different object types and TypeScript's weirdness with empty object type where it will consider filled object as valid, but Python is not better imo even though it is built into the language, I cannot even declare the exact shape of a dictionary or list and the "Pythonic way" is often run-time duck typing (yuck!) + Python linters aren't very smart about types being passed around, forcing me to write types very verbosely in python.
- I would also say python's decision to use indentation rather than curly braces, and/or/not rather than &&/||/! just worsen the developer experience than improving it.
- You also didn't mention about JSDoc and pydoc. JSDoc can be used for type-hinting but I couldn't get pydoc to work the same way.
- Also probably just me but the difference in what is considered an attribute and an index feels unnecessary.
- working with asynchronous code on python feels unnecessarily complex (with asyncio) when compared to JavaScript's Promise-based async-await.
- And the last one, about backwards-compatibility, where there are so many compilers for JavaScript/TypeScript that allows developers to write any cutting-edge features and compile it to any of the older ECMA standards (for example ES2020 to ES5 to support IE).
Most people still imagine JavaScript as having to live in the browser and slow, where in reality it's very similar to python when in comes to environment since you can use Nodejs, Deno, or Bun instead. Plus despite a lot of people still using jQuery, ES6+ JavaScript is actually already very capable of doing all of the jobs that used to be a pain to do without jQuery. It's the same thing as meme-ing PHP for being slow and bad to develop in, even though a lot of things have changed since PHP 5 (yes, I do like modern PHP).
I feel JavaScript has its pain points (as with every other programming languages) but those are not what are pointed out within your video.
thanks for share your wisdom
Thank you!
first comment! sick videos thank you Arjan
Glad you like them!
@@ArjanCodes Like them? I love them. You’re doing God’s work
I just simply don’t care about JS anymore after learning python and using it for automation. It just feels so much more useful for other parts of work flow like system testing.
One thing I want to mention is that Linux comes with python and that’s a big advantage.
I am aware that Python is not the fastest, but I’m trying to figure out how to either use wasm modules (wasmtime half works) but I’ll probably bind to c/c++ directly for now. I’m too many issues with wasm atm with python.
Or maybe I’ll just use mojo :p
One big difference you did miss: JS is at its core (and at its best, IMO) a Scheme variant. In a lot of libraries you see lots of use of functional techniques and functions as values.
To me it looks like GvR is allergic to functional programming. Functools is nice and all, but functional programming is klutzy in Python, to the point it seems almost deliberate. Lambdas are hobbled. It's better than Java, but that's not saying much.
I have hopped around different languages. In Ruby I could idiomatically chain functions to filter and map and slice and dice data and operations to my heart's content, and I ended up with very sophisticated yet quite readable code. In Python if I nest comprehensions more than two deep it's a mess, and if I come back to it more than three weeks later I'm scratching my head. Heaven forbid anyone else has to look at it.
2:38 this is exactly what I'm dealing with right now trying to learn node, and really missing python, lol.
Having written a rack of JS code using the browser and a Django web app I decided to try a node implementation and met promises on reading a text file from the localhost, good grief.
Did you know that the latest browsers do have a JavaScript debugger ?
Making the process of debugging your code much easier than you described it
True, but I barely need to debug at all in Python.
The last time I tried the debugger in Chrome, I encountered lots of issues, especially with concurrent code and Typescript source maps. But that was almost a year ago - perhaps it got better in the mean time.
I run TypeScript in exactly the same way as I run Python on this machine... I can type `python myscript.py` or `deno run myscript.ts`... no browser, no build tool, just me, an interpreter and a text editor.
Compare TypeScript Vs. Python with Types - i use both and almost everything a bit more advanced type wise ends in „you can not do this in Python“. Nobody uses JavaScript like nobody should use plain python when doing serious stuff. The OpenAI SDK for python for example explodes in pylance with errors, while the TypeScript SDK is well strictly typed.
04:00 💯
Dang!! That JS attack felt personal. lol
You don't like Mixins? Then Django comes to you )) Great video, thanks!
My answer:
No HR „specialist” will mistake Python with Java 😁
I appreciated this video, I liked how you pointed out strengths and weaknesses of both languages.
Side note: I think I would have added a short section on how both languages support the functional paradigm, and the magical mystery of JS closures.
Thanks for the tip!
Closures are like objects done the way they should have been done in the first place.
People who come from other OO languages to JS tend to focus on prototypical inheritance but, most of the time, it's better to just pretend prototypes and that stupid `class` keyword simply don't exist at all and just bask in the glory of closures instead.
I really thought this was gonna be about pyscript and javascript
You didn't address the most important issue... which language has the best logo!
also there´s a weird relationship btwn business demand and user popularity ...
you know.. when firms look for developers they are bound to search in the existing pool of candidates...
and since Python is so popular amongst developers, it gets so much easier to find Python developers, so Python becomes popular amongst firms as well...
in short,... firms hire more Python devs because there are more Python devs.. 🤷♂
if there were more C# devs, they would hire more C# devs... so please learn C# so I can find a job 😂
Feels a bit dishonest with the whole setup bit. You compare the browser, nodejs, along with html and even React and CORS?? as part of Javascript setup, and then say Python can just run by default. If you want an honest comparison the only setup-difference is installing nodejs vs installing python... I don't get it. Are you comparing setting up a complete frontend/backend website _and_ browser technicalities (like CORS) using Javascript and other technologies to writing a simple python script that'll run on your computer?
👏👏👏🙌
Just realized, no one, i know, pronounce Guido’s full name like native Dutch. Not even close… 😅
JavaScript 👍
Arjan must be a VERY early millennial if he recalls the nightmare of PHP and VB popularity.
I’m more of a Gen X’er actually. Started out with Basic and Turbopascal in the 1980s.
@@ArjanCodes ah... I thought so! My first computer was a TRS-80. It was the nice one with two disk drives.
"Python is so great" As there using an app built using JavaScript, literally replying using JavaScript. Oh yeah Python is really cutting edge.
Largely a performance and support issue. The development experience is obviously much better in Python.
Who knows what will happen in the future with things like Mojo and Pyscript?
JavaScript was rushed out and then maintained and improved. It's unlikely JS will be improved much further, and the development experience is so painful it will be replaced sooner or later.
PHP and VisualBasic... 😂 😂 😂. I am so glad its NOT 1998 anymore!
Same! 😂
Javascript is c++ and its fast!
I study both languages, and I think Python looks clean, while JavaScript looks
too busy ( {
};
The good thing about JS is that it looks more like the other languages (no indentation, it uses curly braces etc). And that helps when learning other languages that are more complex.
JavaScript: the most hated
Python: the most popular
think that PHP and Java are the most hated
wrong.. only those who don't know JS, h@tes it
there exists pyscript
You made a typo in your title. It's JavaScript > Python not JavaScript vs Python. It's like saying Svelte vs React. No it's Svelte > React.
JavaScript is pain. TypeScript is slightly less pain.
Difficult to continue watching after you talk about how simple it is to run a simple Python script and then go off with your BS about JavaScript being so complicated. A simple JS script needs a browser, that's it.
For any serious work, you’ll need way more than that and things become a lot more complex.
As a PHP developer I am deeply offended by your intro joke. I and my dollar signs will never visit this estabilshment again.
My dollar signs and me
English kinda hard to understand at times. Also body language tip: touching your face while talking communicates anxiety and lack of confidence. To communicate in a more confident manner, try to keep both hands on the table, instead of bringing one near your face. 👍