I'm rooting for WASM to win.

One of the things that discouraged me from Front-end Web Development is JavaScript weirdness. It just has too many pitfalls and it's very hard to debug for a newcomer unless you study a proper JS course that tells you precisely all of these traps before you get burned. I've never found a programming language that didn't behave like I expected it on first touch, except for JS.

I am fully aware TypeScript exists, and there are transpilers where the syntax (modern ECMAScript) and rules are more appropriate to current times, but these aren't "native" of the browser. You must still transpile to the hazardous old JS. I know transpilers avoid many of these pitfalls, but I cannot avoid feeling like I'm building a skyscraper in quicksand.

The hard thing about talking about this exact topic it's that I'm sure my comment will trigger negatively a ton of developers, because talking about JS like this it's going to feel like I've insulted a cult. Let me be clear this is not my intention. I come from the static-typed programming languages world, so I have a preference for my programming to be the most correct.

WASM to me provides this solid foundation, if only (big IF) we manage to create a browser where the main execution virtual machine is not a JS one. I've dreamed of a browser that supports multiple stacks, instead of the HTML/CSS/JS monopoly. For instance, why'd be too hard to think about something like HTML/CSS/Python?[0]

JS has been a discourager to me career-wise, and I'm doing great in Back-end Web Dev, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one feeling this way about it. The web should be more accessible in this sense.

[0]: I am aware of the existence of Brython: https://brython.info/, but it's not my point, that is still Python-over-JS.

I think WASM will win. I've been using JavaScript for 25+ years, and I just wrote a SPA using Rust/WASM using the Leptos framework: https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos, and now I don't want to go back to JavaScript. Cargo is a superior package manager, with Cargo I might actually be able to let me my project sit for a year or two and go back and build to a working runtime without having to do a lot of dependency updates (good luck doing that with NPM). Rust has a solid type system, and with the borrow checker along with pattern exhaustive matching I can write something that I know is solid and will be difficult to break. There is no need to have multiple stages build pipeline running through Babel and Webpack which need to be properly configured; simply compile Rust to the WASM target and that is it. The WASM bundle is also likely to be smaller than a corresponding JavaScript bundle. Additionally, with Rust it is easier to do low-level stuff in the client efficiently such as feature extraction from image binaries. Also, the application I wrote with WASM is faster than a similar app I wrote in React, although I attribute that mostly to the fact that Leptos does not use a virtual DOM as React does.