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Comment by GoranM | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't invest in JS.

This, so much. I can't believe companies are pushing to port everything to one of the worst language in existence. Okay, I get the benefits of easy deployment, but what about performance, debugging, ecosystem, typechecking, compile-time optimizations, general engineering, etc.?

Surely we must know better in 2013.

I don't see what makes Javascript the worst language in existence? Some of its cruft is being removed (mainly the horrible var scope) with ES6/7. I think some future revision of JS that removes most the cruft (like ; insertion) will be awesome.

Yes, mandatory semicolons are good, looking forward to it. People are also discovering best practices in JavaScript, which is also good. In lots of regards, however, it will always be inferior to languages that are thought through from the very beginning, and tons of headaches could be saved with just a little more investment in proper environments.

I wouldn't call it the worst language in existence by any means, but it does have some things I find extremely irritating - lack of a decent module system, overly verbose at times (like when creating anonymous functions), sneaky silent type conversions that still get me from time to time (sorting a list of integers - oops, lexicographical, not numerical ordering).

Having said that, it also has a lot of cool features and I use it every day. Most of the time, I find it a decent enough experience.

"Everything that can be written in JS will ultimately be written in JS".

So we should wait for browser vendors to agree on a new next generation language for the web and wait until everyone updates to a browser that supports it?

Like it or not these developments are turning JS into a bytecode for the web. Maybe one day there will be other language options but why not invest in making the best of what we do have?

So we should wait for browser vendors to agree on a new next generation language for the web and wait until everyone updates to a browser that supports it?

No, we should grab the first thing available and run with it, making sporadic additions and optimizations to do cool-thing-of-he-day, completely ignoring overall architecture and neglecting original purpose behind the technology we use. Next stop: compiler that will translate C code into Excel macros.

There are apparently some readers who are abusing the down votes. The hackernews voting system is not a "like" voting system. It is to sort out inappropriate comments and value informative and pertinent comments.

What would you invest in? I'm currently working on a small engine for an indy game using JS for the front and backend and am interested in alternatives that are perhaps more future proof.

Well, I don't know what you really mean by "future proof". JavaScript will probably remain the lowest common denominator, for years to come, so from that perspective, there's no safer bet.

However, for people who want to have an edge, as developers, working in their language of choice is one sure way to get it.

There are many different developments to make that happen, like languages that compile to JavaScript, or binaries that run in the browser via NaCL; I think there's a lot of potential there.

... JavaScript was not a language designed with software engineering in mind; that much should be clear. If you can choose the proper language for the task at hand, instead of simply being forced into JS, you'll be ahead.

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