The Anti-JavaScript Conspiracy

THE GOOD
- JavaScript is adopted in every significant browser, and as so it is one of the most popular programming languages in the world.
- JavaScript is a good programming language. Most developers agree with this. It's down to earth, has a good enough feature set, implements good concepts from both the object oriented and functional programming mindsets.

THE BAD
- JavaScript is incomplete. Several functional programming features that'd make sense in it are lacking.
- JavaScript is insecure. There's no module system, it's impossible to encapsulate things properly.
- JavaScript is browser only. The lack of a decent standard pushes people away from server-side and compiled JavaScript.

THE UGLY
- Million dollar companies are interested in million dollar franchises. Java, C# make a lot of money for a lot of people.
- Companies are shit-scared of anything they can't control. Even if their product is good and everybody wants to use it, it must be their product. It is no wonder C++ isn't nearly as popular as it was a few years ago. C++ wasn't Sun's, wasn't Microsoft's, wasn't Adobe's; it was Bjarne's.
- The number of JavaScript developers is growing exponentially. The more people use the Internet, the more JavaScript developers show up. What if they decise to use their dear language in their desktop applications? Who could stop them? What would be the faith of Java and .NET?
- JavaScript is, at the same time, both a free language (because it's easy to implement and widely adopted in browsers, the commonest pieces of software today) and a controlled one (the ECMA standard obeys the decisions of giant corporate players).

CONNECT THE DOTS.

>>7
Javascript was a language which was designed in a rush. The language designer was smart, but the management/marketing asked him to make it have a Java syntax, hence the name. Since then they've tried to move the language even closer to Java. While the language designer had good intentions, this doesn't mean his intentions match the corporate intentions, which just wanted another Java clone. I got to write a little bit of ActionScript lately and I noticed they even removed eval, what a shame.
I think better solutions for those that want to develop for the browser would be to just write in your favorite language and compile to Javascript. You could for example write a subset of Lisp and compile it to Javascript. It's a bit of a shame they don't have goto or mandatory TCO(one of those features is needed if you want to use the language as a backend/target language in a compiler. goto is straightforward for translating many constructs, and TCO by itself allows avoiding using goto, while actually getting all the efficiency of it, and in some case even more flexibility.).