Comment by techiferous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techiferous | Hacker News Reader

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It's hard to predict 10 years out, but not too hard to see 5 years ahead. Generally speaking, what's popular now existed in some form 5 years ago.

JavaScript has a monopoly as the only language that runs in browsers. If this were to change, it will take years, not months, for browsers to start supporting another language (or go to a bytecode model). Then it will take more time for developers to start using these new languages and then an ecosystem of tools and libraries to form around this. Then it will take even more time for the "old" language JavaScript to seem obsolete.

JavaScript is currently gaining traction and is the lingua franca of the client-side Internet, which is growing. This is why I predict it will still be strong in 5 years, because it's got a lot of momentum and I only see the trends as increasing (mobile devices are increasing, browsers are becoming even more like operating systems with memory management etc., JavaScript as a language is continually being improved).

I agree, but just out of curiosity: what do you think would be the language of choice beyond JS for the browsers of the future?

I honestly don't have a clue. I might guess Python because it's so big at Google and Chrome is already more or less the industry standard.

We really need a quantum leap in language technology. Currently the Internet technologies have grown organically and because of this, most of what we use to program has been repurposed.

HTML was meant to describe text, now it describes regions of the screen to be repainted as well as the "content" to be repainted.

CSS was meant to add simple effects like bold, italic and simple newspaper-like positioning (float this image left). It's been repurposed to describe visual rendering and even animations.

JavaScript was meant to add some scriptability to the DOM, and now it's morphed into a full-fledged programming language.

So the state of the web is a depressing mishmash of old, repurposed technologies.

It would be nice if there were a programming language that "knew" about the web. It would realize that the programming effort would be shared between two computers, client and server, and would have appropriate security and other conveniences baked in. For example, you should only have to describe your business logic once (as opposed to once on the server and once on the client). Also, this programming language should no longer be tied to the anachronistic concept of rendering a "document" with "styles".

But alas, it's very hard to simply go into an academic tower and design a language and release it into the wild and expect it to catch on. These things tend to grow organically and incrementally. So whatever next step there is has to embrace where we currently are. This is why you see not merely new client-side languages, but new languages that compile to JavaScript. If they didn't compile to JavaScript, how could they ever be used?

Absolutely agreed. I really love JavaScript for a lot of reasons, but it still astonishes me that that our lingua franca was designed in 10 days. In 1995. For NETSCAPE.

I'm not so sure I would describe the mishmash as unambiguously depressing. It's also pretty inspiring seeing people using the mishmash in a sort of bricolage kind of way. One thinks of libraries like Underscore and Backbone that seek to account for some of the "deficiencies" in JS.

And don't even get me started on CoffeeScript.

But I think we would both agree that it's strange that no one has come along attempting to really REALLY break the mold by designing a new browser from the ground up that wasn't tied to JavaScript and the DOM (and maybe not even HTML!).

You go first :)

Remember that Google already launched a second language for the browser - Dart. But no other browser vendor seem to want to support it...

This is true now, but Dart is also less than a year old. I don't have strong feelings toward Dart either way, but these things have a gestation period. Internet Explorer didn't support JavaScript at first either, and Safari and Chrome didn't exist in 1995. So it really remains to be seen.

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