I agree wtih this post. I think every PHP developer should be mindful to watch out for progress from Apache and Mozilla development teams for when they implement an Apache mod that loads a super-fast Javascript intepreter that supports add-ons to be easily written in C. Once that gets to fullspeed, you’ll start to see the advantages of using one single language to make your website — Javascript on the server, and Javascript on the client.

And when that happens, you’ll want to watch out for what happens on the job project and freelancer sites. Will we start to see an uptick for requests for this platform? I think so, yes, and it might start to ramp up in 2011, if not sooner.

You might want to keep an eye on this chart.

[…] Personally I think Javascript has a bright future. It’s just that a lot of people are still stuck at Stage 1 and the stigma of toy language keeps them there indefinitely. Stage 2 is transitory and brief, and almost always results in a transition to Stage 3. […]

Good point Derrick! It should be up there on my list, but I totally missed it. Thanks for bringing this up.

I’m surprised you didn’t mention tamarin “a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification.” http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ .

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.

[quote comment=”8916″]You bet. Look at http://www.effectgenerator.com for an example.

You forgot that Flash is now written in Javascript, which is pretty important![/quote]

Wow, that is pretty impressive. :)

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

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

JavaScript continues to blow my mind every day – it’s like play-dough for the web. Server-side JavaScript? That’s a frightening thought that I’m now going to have to look into deeper – thanks for the article!

Just in case you haven’t noticed, Javascript is already the most deployed language there is. pretty much every web request is from a device supporting js, (braindead mobile stuff aside), no other language has the reach of js.

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.

JavaScript rules in the browser scripting area – it is already the ‘big language’ there.

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.

[quote post=”2406″]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.[/quote]

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.

[quote post=”2406″]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.[/quote]

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.