I think that this is a damning testimonial to the sorry state of software development today. We have not made any real progress since 2008.

JavaScript is inferior to just about every other mainstream language in just about every way. The only benefit that JavaScript has is that it is available in almost every web browser installation. Other than that, there is nothing good about JavaScript.

As a language, JavaScript is very inconsistent, and it is missing many basic features that users of other languages take for granted. The library of classes offered by most implementations is extremely limited and awful. The development tools are just plain bad in most cases. And that’s just the beginning of what’s wrong with JavaScript!

Any good news we hear about JavaScript always comes down to it catching up to where C++ was in the late 1990s, or where Java was in the mid 2000s, or where C# was in the late 2000s.

It’s not “innovation” when JavaScript now only performs poorly, rather than too damn slow to be usable. Nor is it “innovation” when JavaScript debuggers allow for stepping through code. It’s merely JavaScript catching up to where the rest of the industry was years, or even decades, ago.

It’s just not something to be proud about, especially when it’s all happening 18 years after JavaScript was first released!

On Dart, was a bit flummoxed and skeptical when it was first announced and rolled out, but it has come along in the year since that article you link to (re: JS fallback)…

…seeing a HelloWorld blow out to that much code is alarming, but consider that most JS web apps include a boat load of library (jQuery, AMD, Bootstrap, etc.…) code, it’s not entirely out of line. And given that JS is the lingua franca of client side scripting, JS output is to be the norm for the foreseeable future.

After dabbling (and some significant production work in Node JS / Coffeescript), uncertain that Dart is a lesser option — yes, there is a lot of goober-ness in the language that I don’t get, but the integrated web application focus is appealing. Recently bought a book and have been learning — if you can push the quirky ugliness aside, Dart does remedy the short fallings of JS, and might be more desirable as a more structured solution than CoffeeScript or other library soup alternatives.

Chris Wellons wrote:

You sure got a lot of hate in the comments on that old post (April 2008), even though you were generally right about JavaScript’s future.

Yep, I think that post might have got linked somewhere like reddit or hacker news (or maybe dig – did we have hacker news in 08?). When that happens I usually put on my flame retardant suit, as not to fuel the brewing flame war. Also comes in handy when the overloaded server overheats and catches fire. :P

This is actually why I think Steve Yegge stopped blogging about programming. Each post would yield an avalanche of hate from reddit, hn and etc. I hate when good bloggers get burned out by the inevitable internet suck. :P

@ Chris Wellons:

Thanks, those are excellent points. Without V8 there wouldn’t be Node. Google can also probably be linked to massive push innovation rush in the browser market in general. Up until then the state of the art was whatever Mozilla and Opera folks were doing and they took their sweet time because their main competitor stood still and didn’t give half a fuck. Now that Google came out with a rapidly improved, lean and fast browser Firefox suddenly switched to to rapid release cycle and Microsoft realized releasing a security patch to IE6 once a year just won’t cut it. :P

And yeah, I like the wart discussion. I think John Resig (of jQuery fame) used to have really interesting blot posts about this same type of stuff every once in a while and I always enjoyed them even if a some of them were going a bit over my head (talking about complexities of jQuery innards and what not).

Oh, and the LI thing – I think that’s just default WordPress setting. For some reason it does not like list tags. I never bothered to change it.

You sure got a lot of hate in the comments on that old post (April 2008), even though you were generally right about JavaScript’s future. As you mentioned, not only did IE9 (2011), Node.js (2009), and HTML5 (2008) not exist when you made that prediction, but there are a few more things you missed:

* Google Chrome and V8 (late 2008) — That was a huge event for JavaScript and web development in general! It forced all the browsers to take performance a lot more seriously, so that they could keep up with Google. JavaScript is around two orders of magnitude faster than it was when you made your original post.

* ECMAScript 5th Edition (late 2009) — The spec has progressed significantly, helping to fix up some of JavaScript’s problems. When you wrote your post, 3rd edition was the lowest common denominator, but now 5th edition has been reliably implemented everywhere important.

* IE6 is now dead (2010-ish?) — It’s officially supported through 2014 (XP SP3) but very few people need to worry about supporting IE6 anymore. Google has dropped support for it and Microsoft has asked people to stop using it. The next big event for IE will be the death of IE8. That can’t come soon enough.

(This is the second time I wanted to make a list but you won’t let use use the <li> tag in comments!)

Looking at the bleading edge of JavaScript, especially at the newer parts of HTML5, the future can be seen coalescing before your eyes. It’s just about patience as we wait for the various implementations to support the new stuff consistently enough to step out onto it. Each new browser version pushes the frontier out a little bit more.

I’m glad you’re enjoying my JavaScript series. There are at least several more quirks I have yet to cover. I hope I don’t come off too much like I’m complaining about the language. There’s a very reasonable language hidden inside if you can see past all the warts. Like Elisp, it’s just a lot of fun to talk about the warts. :-) Only picking it up recently (now that the trend is obvious), I actually already like it better than Java, which itself holds a fairly high spot in my preferences list. So it sits somewhere above Java and below Elisp.