A small wave has hit the developer community this weekend about a clash between two lead developers: Chris Wilson of Microsoft’s IE team and and Brendan Eich of the Mozilla foundation. The dispute is about the acceptance of ECMAScript 4; the proposed successor of Javascript. Wilson wrote public doubts about this standard, which let Eich to write a public letter in which Microsoft is being blamed for being reluctant and passive in the development of ECMA4. The debate is interesting, but we have to keep in mind that these are two individuals fighting over this dispute; there are no official positions here. However, I want to leave this aside (I know too little about the dispute as well to make sound arguments), and focus on how I perceive the future of client-side scripting.
As a programmer, I have always been a little bit relucant in learning Javascript. I get the same feeling when I work with Visual Basic. There is something… uneasy about it. The last couple of years I have mainly been programming in modern OO languages such as C++, Java and C#. A procedural language such as Javascript forces me to make such a leap in my approach and thinking that I feel being held back by the language. But I have the same with C. So, clearly it is not the fault of Javascript. In fact, I think Javascript is a good language in that it is easy to read because of a nice syntax, it has good scripting properties such as dynamic typing and it offers a lot of expression.
The question raises.. why is there the need for a ‘new’ javascript? The main force behind it, is to make the language more ‘professional’. Make it more object-oriented, advanced exception handling, templates, etc. Indeed, these are things that are very important for any application of reasonable size. But is it important for Javascript? I have never used Javascript outside the webbrowser. In fact, I think most of the Javascript I use is either developed by a 3rd party or generated on-the-fly. Ajax? I use convenient libraries that abstract me away from the low-level javascript.
An article bij Joel Spolsky on the newSDK made me think about the role of Javascript nowadays. It is a great thing that almost all browsers support Javascript. Could you imagine all browsers supporting a language like, say, C++? Most C++ compilers don’t even support the langague the full 100%. I am sure that the software engineers at Mozilla do not want to spend their time supporting a huge and complex language like that. The reason Javascript is so widely supported and popular is for the same reason the C language is still widespread today. It is the biggest denominator across languages, OS-es and browsers. If you write something in Javascript, there is a very good change it will be supported by the platform a client uses. The same is true for the C language, it is extremely powerfull because of the universal support. Even if the C language in itself can be considered obsolete by modern standards.
I believe that we should keep an easy, intuitive, flexible and powerfull language that can be executed for all browsers on all platforms, including new technologies such as PDA’s and small mobile browsers. If you want higher-level constructs, you can use high-lever languages and ‘compile’ them down to javascript. For example, I could specify application logic in C#, which would then be outputted as Javascript in the final output. We can see the same in many smaller domain specific languages which transform a higher-level program into a c-program, which can then be compiled almost everywhere.
I do not believe that adding higher-level constructs into a language such as Javascript will make developers leave their current language and switch to Javascript. Surely, it would be more convenient if you were actually creating client-side javascript by hand. But in my experience, that doesn’t happen a lot. But it would make it much harder for current browsers and future browsers to provide a (correct) implementation. You do not want a browser to implement a virtual machine just to be able to run an advanced javascript.
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