Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the best alternatives to JavaScript when writing web applications?

18th December 2010

My answer to What are the best alternatives to JavaScript when writing web applications? on Quora

CoffeeScript is rather nice—it compiles to non-obfuscated JavaScript.

Posted 18th December 2010 at 10:49 am · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025
LLM 0.27, the annotated release notes: GPT-5 and improved tool calling - 11th August 2025

This is What are the best alternatives to JavaScript when writing web applications? by Simon Willison, posted on 18th December 2010.

javascript 718 quora 1005

Next: What is the best license for a web framework (ex: Cake, Rails, Django): GPL, BSD, MIT, other? Why?

Previous: JustinTV+> Fenerbahçe Antalyaspor Maçını Canlı izle

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe