Silverlight... with "performance" stuff in C#? What kind of client-side scripting is going on that we need to push it down to C#?
Javascript does a great job manipulating the DOM, especially with Prototype and the like.
Having a stronger scripting language in the browser like python (even ruby?) would be great if it didn't come at a significant cost and increased performance. If you'd ask anyone who spends a significant amount of time writing js code, they'd want it faster. Not Python that is built on top of a proprietary engine (plugin based!), that uses... JAVASCRIPT to embed it.
On top of that, the python code looks semantically identical to DOM manipulation in Prototype. So really the only thing you've gained is "writing client code in python" while dumping proprietary formats and a huge initial download on your users. I'll excuse myself as sensationalist when I say that it seems a little selfish on the developer's part.
As much as I love .NET, I just can't get excited about Silverlight. When you require your users to install a new plugin, it raises the barrier to entry pretty significantly -- especially when you're talking about technical users.
Personally, I took a different route: I created a Python->Javascript compiler with a real macro system. Allows me to quickly hack damn near anything together and keeps me away from JS (which I can't stand, largely for aesthetic reasons), without imposing anything at all on my users.
This is interesting in a very narrow niche. But even being a Python fanboy I'm more likely to bring JS into the server than Python into the browser. It just makes huge piles of sense.
Depends on your audience. For a lot of in-house applications, that wouldn't be much of a problem. But if you are trying to build a new social media web site, it might well be.
I mostly agree with you, but, just to play devil's advocate...
How exactly would you propose cramming a usable Python runtime into a download that was substantially less than 1.5 MB in size? On the OS X 10.5 box I'm sitting at right now, the 'libpython2.6.a' static library from my source build of Python 2.6 is over 6 MB. The actual 'python' binary is nearly 2 MB, and stripped of all debugging symbols, still comes in at about 1.4 MB.
If you had some really good compression, and included only a small part of the standard library, I can see getting a CPython package in around the 2-3 MB mark, but not much more.
Javascript does a great job manipulating the DOM, especially with Prototype and the like.
Having a stronger scripting language in the browser like python (even ruby?) would be great if it didn't come at a significant cost and increased performance. If you'd ask anyone who spends a significant amount of time writing js code, they'd want it faster. Not Python that is built on top of a proprietary engine (plugin based!), that uses... JAVASCRIPT to embed it.
On top of that, the python code looks semantically identical to DOM manipulation in Prototype. So really the only thing you've gained is "writing client code in python" while dumping proprietary formats and a huge initial download on your users. I'll excuse myself as sensationalist when I say that it seems a little selfish on the developer's part.