alt Hacker News1. it's built for async 2. runs everywhere 3. interpreted, making it fast to iterate on 4. decent performance 5. most popular language, llms are decent at writing it
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JVM has real and virtual threads and arguably just as good if not better on all these points.
(I actually have/am writing a harness in Java fwiw, but mostly as a hobby/experimentation)
That actually don't like you're describing Python. I've been working on a couple JS/TS projects and it's like the models I use (Claude Sonnet and DeepSeek v4 Flash) continually struggle to do coherent work; I have to always keep close watch to reduce sloppiness. I go to Python and it's smooth sailing with minimal prompting (and reduced token burn) for acceptable outcomes.
aren't 3 and 4 a tradeoff though? Yes you have 3 but "decent performance" cannot be an extaled value as compared to "runs everywhere". If its used as a counter balance to 3 then it shouldn't be its own unique point basically saying 4 is true despite 3 in this case.
decent performance, lol! compared to what? a shell script? "i'll only take up 200MB of disk and 4GB of RAM to output flickering text on a terminal. boy this is high performance"
fast iteration is for POCs. once you have the app built and working, you need performance and stability much more than fast iteration
An additional benefit of interpreted, I think, is to make plugins easier to distribute and incorporate. With a compiled language you’d need message passing or something.