Why JavaScript Is the New Perl

theodp writes "'People are thoroughly excited [about JavaScript],' writes Lincoln Baxter. 'However, I'd akin this to people discovering Perl during the advent of C and C++ (mirror). Does it work? Yes. Is it pretty? Not by a long shot.' Baxter adds, 'While I do like both languages, JavaScript [is] just waiting for the next technology to come around and make it look like Perl does today: pervasive, but lacking enterprise adoption on large applications.'"

Comments

Re:I don't..

[dkf]

1)Web programmers tend to be lower skill programmers. ...

2)There's a hack it and get it done mentality to web programmers. ...

I agree with these two statements. But your next one:

3)The entire AJAX and framework of web programming is wrong. It was a quick hack added so that you could make dynamic apps using existing technologies without major changes to clients. But its layered hack upon hack upon hack. We really need to scrap it all and come up with a web application programming stack- a new markup language that's meant to do pixel perfect rendering (HTML is not, but its used that way), an HTTP replacement that's stateful rather than stateless, a cleaner way of sending data back and forth from the server. But if you write on top of an ugly platform, you're going to get ugly code.

That's just ignorant of how nasty client programming really is. The reality is that using a stateless base layer of HTTP and building a state system on top of that (e.g., with REST) is significantly easier to make work properly in a hostile physical network environment than what you propose.

AJAX is one heck of a lot easier to deal with though once it's been tamed with a library like jQuery, and once you've wrapped your head around asynchronous programming. Some programmers never really get async programming (I feel sorry for them, missing out on such powerful techniques) but it is really very useful for almost all network and GUI coding. There's no shame in using a library to make networking nicer; raw POSIX socket calls are horrendous from the perspective of the vast majority of application programmers...

4)Language issues. Javascript was never a good language- hell, you can tell that from the fact it's very name was a blatant marketing maneuver. Lack of a good object model is a real problem.

There's not much wrong with prototype-based object models; they're different, not wrong. If you were going to rag on the language design, it would be far better to grouse about the "fun" gotchas in scoping and the way one handles modularization...