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The Great JavaScript Debate: Improve It Or Kill It

Posted by Soulskill on from the cast-your-votes-now dept.

snydeq writes "Recent announcements from Google and Intel appear to have JavaScript headed toward a crossroads, as Google seeks to replace the lingua franca of the client-side Web with Dart and Intel looks to extend it with River Trail. What seems clear, however, is that as 'developers continue to ask more and more of JavaScript, its limitations are thrown into sharp relief,' raising the question, 'Will the Web development community continue to work to make JavaScript a first-class development platform, despite its failings? Or will it take the "nuclear option" and abandon it for greener pastures? The answer seems to be a little of both.'"

3 of 482 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about neither? by hjf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because Google needs you to run everything in their cloud so the NSA,FBI,CIA, and even the DMV can get easy access to all your documents.

  2. Re:What failings? by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Informative

    HTML5 has worker threads. Javascript does have prototype inheritance.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  3. Read Crockford's "Javascript: the good parts". by csirac · · Score: 4, Informative

    How does one establish whether methods/vars are public/private/protected? Or inheritance? To me, the weird misappropriation of the function keyword to build objects, the verbosity of the code to express objects, and the lack of inheritance, etc. are primitive compared to Actionscript 3, to Java, to PHP5, to C++, and a variety of other languages I've dealt with.

    You really need to read Crockford's "Javascript: the good parts". You absolutely do make private methods and vars (ever noticed that you can't directly call jQuery's internal methods? Or TinyMCE's? Or any other major library/framework?)

    He also makes the case that actually JS has more patterns to allow code re-use. That's why things like Mootools can even fake things that look like classical class inheritance patterns for you, if you really want to do that.

    Check out http://www.crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html and http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html and http://www.slideshare.net/douglascrockford/javascript-the-good-parts-3292746