According to Douglas Crockford, creator of the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) specification, which is used ubiquitously to serialize data in web applications, JavaScript is the world’s most popular programming language in most surveys. is a hindrance to progress.
Crockford claimed in an interview last month:
“The best thing you can do for JavaScript today is to do away with it. Twenty years ago I was one of the few advocates for JavaScript. The combination of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant.” I spent a decade trying to fix that flaw, and I had some small successes with ES5, but since then I’ve become more and more interested in making the language bloated rather than better. So JavaScript, like other dinosaur languages, is an obstacle to progress.We need to focus on the next E-like language rather than JavaScript.”
According to a StackOverflow survey conducted earlier this year, JavaScript is used by more than 65% of developers, well ahead of Python in second place at 48% (the non-general-purpose languages HTML, CSS, and SQL ignored). Given its origins, this is an unlikely achievement.
Brendan Eich invented the language for Netscape in 1995, apparently in just 10 days. “In May he did ten days of hard work and didn’t get much sleep,” Eich said at his 2018 dot.JS conference. In 2012 he Eich told his Computer’s Charles Severance: , embedded directly into web pages for use by web designers and programmers. Java is a professional language and had to do actual code with type declarations and write it in a compiled way. ’” he added. It has less to do with Java and less to do with its common syntactic ancestor, C. ”
Eich called the work “rush work,” but “we knew there would be mistakes and gaps, so we made the language very malleable. It allowed web developers to We were able to make what we wanted.”
What made JavaScript so successful?
There are multiple reasons, such as Eich’s foresight, ease of learning, and tolerance to code that can make mistakes in many languages, such as comparing strings to numbers to get common sense results . Violate important mathematical properties. ”
Another big factor is Google’s determination to make browser-based applications compete with the desktop, bringing the world the V8 engine (2008). Together with Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey and Apple’s JavaScript Core, this has given the language amazing JIT compilation performance. In 2009, Ryan Dahl invented his Node.js to allow V8 to run outside the browser. Dahl had servers in mind for his applications, but now most of his web application development processes also require him Node.js and his NPM (Node Package Manager).
development process? Part of the problem Crockford mentions is that JavaScript has become very complex as it has grown in functionality. A typical application today includes a build process using WebPack, Rollup, or some other bundler, a far cry from Eich’s original concept.
Additionally, many web developers don’t write JavaScript. Rather, you write TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript. TypeScript was invented by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft. The rationale for this is that JavaScript’s malleability and lack of type safety make it unsuitable for large-scale applications. TypeScript is currently his 3rd language in the above survey, showing that JavaScript is completely out of love. The emergence of his WebAssembly, a binary format that can be targeted by languages like C, C++, C# and Rust, is another innovation that could undermine JavaScript’s dominance.
“JavaScript has exploded in popularity in just a few short years. Yes, the ecosystem is terrifyingly complex. Even among full-time JS developers there is an ongoing gag about how insane it is. None of us can keep up,” the developer confessed in a recent discussion on Hacker News.
JavaScript is evolving with lots of new features and you can track your progress here, but asking for compatibility means you can’t fix some flaws, on the contrary feature bloat is always It’s a risk.
E, which Crockford chose to replace JavaScript, is an outlier. Created by Mark Miller, Crockford, and others, E is an object-oriented language designed for secure computing that, in Crockford’s words, “eliminates a lot of the bad things about Java.”
Crockford also said that JavaScript is a difficult language to migrate to because it’s a language supported by all browsers for DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation. Asked about what would replace it, Crockford said: First, we don’t have the following languages yet. It should be a minimal, feature-based actor language designed specifically for secure distributed programming. Anything less than that should not be considered.
“Secondly, all browser makers should adopt it and at the same time replace the DOM with a well-designed interface. Good luck with that.”
