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Parenscript vs Ruby (via Opal)

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When comparing Parenscript vs Ruby (via Opal), the Slant community recommends Ruby (via Opal) for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Ruby (via Opal) is ranked 16th while Parenscript is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Ruby (via Opal) is:

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"] for ss in 0...presidents.length print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n"; end

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Common Questions

What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript?

Parenscript

Ruby (via Opal)

Pros

Pro
It is Common Lisp

Lisps are easy languages to learn (once you get past the parens) and Common Lisp is a very practical dialect.

Pro
Run almost identically on both the browser and server

Parenscript code can run almost identically on both the browser (as JavaScript) and server (as Common Lisp).

Pro
Elegant syntax

presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
    print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end

Pro
Popular

Ruby is one of the most popular languages for developing web sites. As a result, there's an abundant amount of documentation, sample code, and libraries available for learning the language and getting your project up and running. The most popular features are just 'gem install' away.

Cons

Con
The syntax may be hard to learn

Being an implementation of Lisp, Parenscript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language.

Con
Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class.

In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can't tell what kind of "helper" functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times.