I'm not even sure I follow the premise of this article, perhaps someone can enlighten me.
Seems like it's all based on "I don't like Javascript, so we should replace it because no one wants to write it"... whoa hold on a second there professor! I love Javascript. It's fast, full-featured (you can do what Flash can do in Javascript, just don't try to support IE6 -- hardly Javascript's fault), it looks pretty, it's easy to understand, it takes a lot of load off my back-end servers, etc, etc, etc.
I write Javascript all day long and I'm happy about it.
Anyway. I hope Javascript does get more usage, although I think it's already approaching use on 100% of websites as it is... so... mission accomplished!
That's fine, you can keep writing Javascript. The article is about how we choose to do general-purpose computing on the browser platform. Javascript is a natural fit for a large number of applications - it just doesn't make sense to end up in a situation where everything runs in a web browser, and therefore everything would have to be written in Javascript. The alternative that is sketched in the article presents a language agnostic means of achieving much of what Javascript is used for, and some of what we might want to do with the browser platform in the future.
I am no great fan of Javascript but it definitely has it's place and I'm knee-deep in it at the moment. It works and is useful. Should it be used for everything? Of course not.
This article is little more than a rant against a language the author personally doesn't like. That's okay. Maybe he can come up with something better.
HN provides again! Why read past the first paragraph when you can reply straight away!
You did see that the second half of the article was dedicated to reasonably concrete strategies that would be an improvement over the status quo, right?
I think JavaScript is pretty cool, actually. Everything is a hash - how much more simple can it get? In my opinion programming languages should strive for a small number of concepts, and JavaScript does very well in that regard.
There is a point made that anything done in flash should be doable in javascript. But flash is more than just actionscript, it's also a presentation engine that is much more appealing to those little applications that require a speedier UI.
really, all we need is better tools for working with javascript. the language is fine. the pain is in the lack of quality tools.
aptana is the best ide i know of to write javascript in, and it's decent, but you don't get the documentation you can embed into javascript the way you can with visual studio. however, in visual studio, there is no document outliner to quickly navigate large amounts of javascript like you can in aptana studio. so although i like the documentation add-ons microsoft made for intellisense in visual studio, i write javascript primarily with aptana studio. the intellisense in both is merely ok when compared to intellisense for other languages and ides.
then when debugging, the best tool i know of is firefox with firebug, which we all love because it's just there, but is horrible when it comes to stability as of late.
nothing is wrong with the language; major need, though, for better tools.
Proof-carrying code is a fine idea, but the proofs for JS programs get into subtle security ideas, confidentiality and integrity being the big two. Information-flow type systems can address this, but I'm not sure I would call them production ready.
Moreover, Javascript is already a very low bar to set in terms of security, and there are still serious compatibility issues between implementations.
Finally, the fact that the web is human-readable is a boon. Who will standardize the bytecode representation? Our benevolent Macromedia/Adobe overlords? Microsoft? The W3C?
I'm pretty sure most of the current JS interpreters do JIT native compiling of the code... much like Java (that he seems to like more), but with functions as first-class citizens. There are only a few languages I'd rather use than JS, and Java sure isn't one of them!
Seems like it's all based on "I don't like Javascript, so we should replace it because no one wants to write it"... whoa hold on a second there professor! I love Javascript. It's fast, full-featured (you can do what Flash can do in Javascript, just don't try to support IE6 -- hardly Javascript's fault), it looks pretty, it's easy to understand, it takes a lot of load off my back-end servers, etc, etc, etc.
I write Javascript all day long and I'm happy about it.
Anyway. I hope Javascript does get more usage, although I think it's already approaching use on 100% of websites as it is... so... mission accomplished!