While it’s true that both python and js are interpreted languages, making them highly portable, JS at that time was a very lightweight language with a robust runtime offered by mozjs, that was built to be easy to embed into other systems, while python was designed for being the framework in which you build apps directly, hence requiring deeper dependencies.
İf it works good enough for my laptop phone and pc then it’s good enough for everyone else
Besides, it wouldn’t have made much of a massive difference if it was lua or js, but even lua has it’s issues leading to people preferring other versions of lua
Fun fact, roughly half of gnome-shell codebase is written in JavaScript.
Is that bad?
It’s fun
And that’s a fact
A rock fact
I know that extensions are mostly written in js, but why codebase? Any legacy reason I wonder?
From what I can gather
I also see people lamenting that lua wasn’t chosen, so there’s that.
Can you expand on that? How does JS have less requirements than Python?
While it’s true that both python and js are interpreted languages, making them highly portable, JS at that time was a very lightweight language with a robust runtime offered by mozjs, that was built to be easy to embed into other systems, while python was designed for being the framework in which you build apps directly, hence requiring deeper dependencies.
Sources:
https://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/#comment-1691
https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2008/09/09/embeddable-languages-an-implementation/
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/120edc0/comment/jdgwyoq/
İf it works good enough for my laptop phone and pc then it’s good enough for everyone else
Besides, it wouldn’t have made much of a massive difference if it was lua or js, but even lua has it’s issues leading to people preferring other versions of lua
Oh that’s why cinnamon (fork of Gnome 3) uses a ton of JavaScript.