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Comment by alistair77 | Hacker News Reader

"when good developers are driven away by a lousy technology stack".

This fear of JavaScript and a web stack says a lot more about you than the technologies. There are a huge number of good developers creating great software with these languages. Coming from a Java and C# background, learning JavaScript has been a real joy and made me a much better developer.

In my experience, the best developers become productive in new languages very quickly.

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Oh, I don't "fear" JavaScript. It's quite the opposite situation. I have many years of experience with it, from using it with Netscape Enterprise Server in the 1990s, to browser-based development, to more recent server-side development.

Luckily, I also have many years of experience with many other programming languages and platforms. I can see quite easily how poorly JavaScript stacks up against them.

As an industry, we can do better. We have done better. It's not encouraging to see Firefox OS limit itself to the worst options available, when so much better could be done.

Given Mozilla's goals for Firefox OS can you explain how these web technologies are anything but the best option? If you think that Java, C# or Objective C would have been better choices you've misunderstood what they're trying to achieve [hint: it's about creating a mobile OS by extending the world's most widely used technology stack].

By inclination I like languages that have seriously clever type systems, but I hardly ever write code in anything that is not javascript these days, and the reason for that is that javascript can be run easily almost anywhere.

I know that if I write some useful code in javascript, I will not have to rewrite it. You can't really say the same thing about any other language.

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