alt Hacker NewsBut why should it be though? You haven’t really addressed that. It’s like saying “Haskell shouldn’t be its own language, it should just be a couple of features like lambdas integrated into a JavaScript library”. Well if you do that you get some nice features in JavaScript but you’ve done away with the whole value proposition of pure functional programming. That’s an actual loss, there’s something to be said for maintaining a pure set of features that gives languages different properties and guarantees you can’t get with “everything is just a lib to an imperative language”
Pure functional programming and lazy evaluation.. sure, you could create classes and a meta-function that selectively eval's thunks at a time, but the call site of that kind of library would look atrocious..
You might be able to hack on some of the datatype semantics into JS prototype-based inheritance (I'd rather start with TypeScript at that point, but then we're back at the "why isn't it a library" debate) to keep those ontologies from being semantically separate, but that's an uphill battle with some of JS's implicit value conversions.
I consider Logic Programming languages to be the go-to counterargument to TFA but yeah, anything with lazy eval and a mature type system are strong counterexamples too.