JavaScript Creator Talks About the Future

mikejuk writes "JavaScript is currently an important language — possibly the most important of all the languages at this point in time. So an impromptu talk at JSConf given by the creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich, is not something to ignore. He seems to be a worried about the way committees define languages and wants ordinary JavaScript programmers to get involved."

Comments

Re:Javascript is a disaster

[maraist]

""+" doesn't append _two numbers_, but it can append _number to string_ - which you can have in any language with operator overloading."
function foo(x,y) { return x + y; }
foo("5",6) == "56"

In every other language I've seen, the CORRECTly expected result is 11 or error. Perl, C++, etc. The point is that you can never trust your input if you are expecting numeric.

You must guard the inputs with explicit (and thus inefficient/unreadable casts). If you're using a 3rd party library, you'll be pulling you hair out trying to figure out what went wrong.

The language is full of such wtf's. While you can happily redefine most core operations (e.g. how jQuery fixes IE), you can't overload the + operator. Call my cynical, but I don't like languages that let you corrupt basic building blocks.

That being said, javascript is excellent at what it was designed for - and passable for what it's currently used for, but I fear for the future if it's the basis of future industrial strength applications.

One place I WOULD like to see it extended is DB's.. CouchDB has a very nice java-script based map-reduce framework - it leads to concise and expressive code (that's really NASTY if plsql, etc are used).

Basically javascript is excellent fragment-code. But HORRIBLE for modular libraries - having to write an entire library (like jquery) in a scoped wrapper then assigned to a mutable/corruptable symbol is sick. (Especially since library A will mutate library B without permission - hello 1970s!!)