Douglas Crockford Envisions A Post-JavaScript World (infoworld.com)

JavaScript developer (and JSON proponent) Douglas Crockford recently described "a theoretical post-JavaScript World," according to InfoWorld. Crockford "believes the web development staple needs a successor that can fix multiple programming nuances." An anonymous reader summarizes their report: Despite its status as the world's most popular language, Crockford told an audience at the Oracle Code conference, "It would be sad if JavaScript turns out to be the last language." He complained that JavaScript has two different ways of declaring variables -- let and var -- as well as two different "bottom variables" with no value -- both null and undefined. "There's an argument among language designers, should we have bottom values at all? But there's nobody who thinks you should have two of them."

According to InfoWorld, Crockford "also presented a scenario with JavaScript being turned into a purely functional programming language by getting rid of 'impurities' like date, the delete operation, math.random and object.assign. Afterward, he stressed replacing JavaScript rather than adding functional capabilities to it... The next language also should be better able to deal with multiple cores. Most languages have followed the sequential model of Fortran, executing one operation after another, he said. 'That's not how the world works anymore. We now have lots of cores available to us, which all want to be running at the same time.'"
In other news, Crockford also proposed ending the "spaces vs. tabs" debate by simply eliminating tabs altogether.

Comments

tabs4lyf

[fuo]

Crockford also proposed ending the "spaces vs. tabs" debate by simply eliminating tabs altogether.

You go to hell and you die.

Re: tabs4lyf

[ColdWetDog]

Nine for mortal man doomed to die.

Why on Earth?

[Anonymous Coward]

>also presented a scenario with JavaScript being turned into a purely functional programming language by getting rid of 'impurities' like date, the delete operation, math.random and object.assign.

Getting rid of those things does not make JS a functional programming language.

Also, writing in purely functional languages just fucking sucks, they aren't and won't ever be a multi-core-coding panacea, and if highly-parallel-performance computing is your concern for the future, being ignorant to how parallel processing environments work by "letting the compiler decide" isn't going to make things better.

We don't need a new language

[Uranium Willy]

We need a standardised virtual machine that languages can be compiled to run on, that way the language of choice is more free to change. And Web browsers developers can deal with a simpler virtual machine language to translate.

Re:We don't need a new language

[robmv]

WebAssembly

Re:We don't need a new language

[Gravis Zero]

We need a standardised virtual machine that languages can be compiled to run on

NO!!! What we need is for people stop using scripting to turn web pages into applications when 99.99% of the time I JUST WANT TO READ THE GODDAMNED WORDS ON THE PAGE!

even 4 is too much

[lucm]

yaml uses 2 spaces for indents.

Maybe tab should be 1 space, then everyone would be happy.

Re:End it by eliminating spaces

[Chris Mattern]

Wellyoucan'teliminatedspacesbecausethey'dstillbeneeded.Soifyouwanttoeliminatejustonethingit'dhavetobetabs.

Javascript really sucks

[Snotnose]

In the last 40 years I've used lots of languages from BASIC to Z80 assembly, 8080 assembly, 8086 assembly, 68k, C, awk, sed, sh, perl, C++, TCL/Tk, ADA, Python, Java, Javascript. Some I really liked (assembly, C), some I used with trepidation (C++, perl), some I actively hated (TCL/Tk, ADA).

But the one and only language that I felt was actually working against me was javascript. Damned script would pass all my tests, then fail on someone else's machine because they chose different options when installing, or had a different version, or just reasons. Note my scripts wouldn't actually fail, as in an error message. No, they just gave the wrong damned results.

I fucking hate Javascript with a passion and wish it would die by the end of the year.

Comma-separated vs. tab-separated

[tepples]

Tabs should be completely eliminated. They are a obsolete vestige left over from mechanical teletypes.

"Completely" is a strong word. I can understand using spaces for indentation, but if you "completely" eliminate tabs, you break compatibility with POSIX Make. Furthermore, if you "completely" eliminate tabs, then what format for delimited flat files? In my experience, tab-separated values format is more efficient than comma-separated values format because a value is far more likely to need escaping because it contains a comma than because it contains a tab.

Re:Comma-separated vs. tab-separated

[phantomfive]

The solution is easy. The tab character is ascii 0x09. We can remove it, and slide down all the other ascii characters to match and fill in the hole. For example, ascii 'A' would go from 0x41 to 0x40. People can just rewrite their software to handle the new character set, and then the world is cleaner and easier. And don't talk to me about backwards compatibility that's how we get messy software to begin with, lazy people unwilling to refactor to keep things clean. All we need to do is refactor ascii: the benefit is that unicode being a subclass inherits the change automatically OOP is soo cool.

Re:No thanks

[WaffleMonster]

Would you prefer that applications that actually need those features instead be native applications that are specific to an operating system other than the one you use?

Absolutely I prefer it. Native applications provide a much better experience vs. attempting to turn document viewers into general purpose operating systems.

There are a million different solutions to software portability. Our choices are far from shove everything into the browser or going without.

Putting everyone at unnecessary risk in pursuit of the goal of transforming document viewers into operating systems is as foolish as it is counterproductive.