It’s basically the next rhino .

It’s used by flash player, as you’ve sort of already mentioned for the AVM2 (ActionScript VM2).

ActionScript 3 is basically the closest thing to JavaScript 2.0 right now.

You bet. Look at http://www.effectgenerator.com for an example.

You forgot that Flash is now written in Javascript, which is pretty important!

Wow, that is pretty impressive.

You forgot that Flash is now written in Javascript, which is pretty important!

The amount of developers that are familiar with it way exceeds even java, this is why js as an end to end platform facility it is a very compelling argument. (developers, developers, developers…)

but to get there lots of stuff needs to be happen. libs, performance etc. It is happening though, client js, server js, couchDB, is the most coherent stack available today, a stack where you can learn a single language to it’s fullest and use that knowledge in whatever part of the app you are working on.

I’m hopeful it will work out, but so many factors are in play that you can’t make a rational prediction of the outcome.

If nothing else fun times ahead.

But will it get a hold in the other fields(Server side programming, shell scripting, etc)? I hope it will - but I am not very optimistic about it.

Static typing has 2 benefits: Speed, Speed.

I don’t buy the “early error detection” security that some people try to sell. Asserts and test suite are the right way to manage software code quality.

Well said. Still, sometimes sacrificing some speed for increased readability, and expressibility of your code is not that bad.

This argument is a little bit like the argument about garbage collection. Any language that uses it, pays a performance penalty but most people (sans die hard C zealots) agree that it is a good thing in most circumstances.

When we are talking about web applications, the overhead of dynamically typed language is negligible if you consider the real bottlenecks such as database queries and other remote calls.

Also HaXe is a very cool project but not a good choice for anyone looking for the future development language, you may be able to compile down HaXe code to other things but you are always limited to what that language can do, programming in HaXe is just confusing and disconnected. But still cool.

Until today I never heard about HaXe. It’s a coll idea, but I don’t really buy into the whole meta-language thing. It seems like an unnecessary layer of abstraction if you ask me - and a potentially leaky one. I have to take a closer look at it to see if my gut feeling is right though. It might be halfway decent after all.

The best thing that JavaScript2 has going for it is that there is a large community of people including all of the major companies figuring it all out as a group now rather then what is happening with Ruby were everything is being broken up because of different ideas. (CRuby, JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius, and I think there is another one ) JavaScript should have a common base for all platforms as soon as they figure it all out.

Also HaXe is a very cool project but not a good choice for anyone looking for the future development language, you may be able to compile down HaXe code to other things but you are always limited to what that language can do, programming in HaXe is just confusing and disconnected. But still cool.