JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language according to most surveys, has become an obstacle to progress, according to Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), a specification widely used to serialize data in web applications.
Crockford made this point in an interview last month:
“The best thing we can do with JavaScript today is put it out of business. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few fans of JavaScript. Its combination of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant. I’ve spent a decade trying to fix its flaws .I’ve had little success with ES5. But since then, there has been a great interest in the further expansion of the language, rather than in its improvement. So JavaScript, like other dinosaur languages, has become an obstacle to progress. We should focus on the next language, which should look more like E than JavaScript.”
According to a StackOverflow survey conducted earlier this year, JavaScript is used by more than 65% of developers, well ahead of Python, which came in second at 48% (excluding HTML, CSS, and SQL, which are not general-purpose languages).
Crockford also acknowledged that there are two difficulties in replacing browser-based JavaScript, according to the article. “First of all, we don’t have the next language yet. It should be a minimal capabilities based actor language designed specifically for secure distributed programming. Nothing less should be considered.
“Second, we need all browser manufacturers to adopt it and simultaneously replace the DOM with a well-designed interface. Good luck.”
