How long until there's a really good JVM written in JavaScript of some form and embedded Java apps end up running in JavaScript for performance and security reasons?
It'll be even more ridiculous and hilarious if the "j" in "jruby" ends up meaning "JavaScript".
I though JS was named to piggyback on Java's popularity, not because it was actually intended to complement Java.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2653798/application-develop...
That's an amusing idea. But it's extremely unlikely for the same reason that you are unlikely to see C++ rewritten in JavaScript.
It's possible, however, that over time, more and more languages might target JavaScript, rather than the JVM or the native hardware.
For instance, I program in Scala for a living. The main platform for Scala is the JVM, but there's also Scala.js, which targets JavaScript. And in fact, we now write most of our "JavaScript" in Scala, rather than in JavaScript.
I suppose that someday there might be a version of Java that targets JavaScript, and then your dream might come true. Oh wait... it already happened! It's called GWT and it's been around for a decade.
I still wonder what might have been if Eich had been allowed to write the Scheme system he had been hired to do. While I'm not a fan of Scheme by any means, it is approximately 281,757,423,024,353 better than JavaScript.
And Scheme's a great little language for implementing other languages. Imagine, we could have had transpiling years ahead of time. We might be using S-expressions instead of JSON. Heck, we might even have moved to an S-expression syntax for HTML & CSS by now.
Imagine, one syntax for everything (thanks to https://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_intro_... & https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_howto.asp for the examples):
(html (head (title "Example")
(style (body (background-color linen))
(h1 (color maroon)
(margin-left (px 40)))))
(body
(h1 "What can JavaScript do?")
(p (@ (id "demo")) "JavaScript can " (em "change") " HTML content.")
(button (@ (type "button")
(onclick (set! (inner-html (get-element-by-id document "demo"))
"Hello JavaScript!")))
"Click me!")))
I imagine that folks would have cottoned on to the advantage pretty quickly. And those that didn't … I guess they could have always become telephone cleaners or something:-)
Not to mention that there were other ways to execute code in the browser in those days. We have 'no choice' but Javascript today simply because it's the option that people eventually gravitated towards, forcing the others out of the market.
The original suggestion was that people would use Javascript, or any other language in its place, simply by virtue of it being the only option. I argue that the wrong language would hamper adoption, and eventually some other language – like, say, VBScript which came only 6 months later – would have taken over.
Javascript persisted, and eventually completely dominated, because it was good enough. A language not good enough would have not had the same success, even given the otherwise same environment to grow up in.
If JavaScript had had Lisp syntax, then everyone would still be using Flash. Or some other plugin that provided a language with a more popular syntax.
IME it's a learned thing from only knowing languages that at least superficially resemble ALGOL.
JS is a first language for a lot of people - because their goal was to make a website do something. Scheme would not have been any different.
IME many computer programmers learned Lisp in college and for some reason hated it–I think in part due to the syntax and in part because they had a hard time with recursion and other "mind-bending" concepts. They often still harbor an irrational precedent to this day.
Me, on the other hand, I loved Lisp as soon as I learned it. (Perhaps I was primed by having learned APL in high school.) I changed my major from Astrophysics to Computer Science because I felt that SICP was even cooler than black holes and neutron stars.
If people disliked the syntax enough to avoid the language (and the browser that uses it), I imagine that other browsers would've started supporting other languages, and something else would've dominated.
In IE world, things were actually even crazier, because the whole scripting story was extensible (via Active Scripting). So you could use Perl, for example...
Did you see the '(set! (inner-html (get-element-by-id document "demo")) "Hello JavaScript!")' bit? That's DOM-handling in Scheme. Not a really great API, but it's not terrible either.
I do not want to ever have to update Flash again. Ever.
Much of the JVM is written in C++ (From the docs: "There are nearly 1500 C/C++ header and source files, comprising almost 250,000 lines of code.")
I disagree. In moving to the single-threaded async style of JS concurrency, the hardest part for me has been to rid myself of the ugly habit I acquired from Java's threading model, i.e. asking myself at each line of code, what happens if my thread gets preempted here?
Java is just a language that runs on JVM, there have been many many attempts to replace it with languages brand new ( scala), existing languages ( jruby) including javascript( nashorn/ringojs ect), but no language has even come close to dethroning it. Its unlikely that javascript will replace it just because jvm is rewritten in java script.
that is not what oc meant. he is talking about runtime env, not source language