Published on Aug 06, 2022
According to the interview taken by Evrone, Douglas said, “The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few advocates for JavaScript. Its cobbling together of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant. I spent a decade trying to correct its flaws. I had a minor success with ES5. But since then, there has been strong interest in further bloating the language instead of making it better. So JavaScript, like the other dinosaur languages, has become a barrier to progress. We should be focused on the next language, which should look more like E than like JavaScript.”
The JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) specification is used everywhere for serializing data in web applications, yet JavaScript remains the world’s most popular programming language according to most surveys.
A recent StackOverflow survey found that JavaScript is used by over 65% of developers, well ahead of Python at 48 percent (ignoring HTML, CSS, and SQL, which are not general-purpose languages). Given its origins, it seems unlikely that such a feat would have been achieved.
In 1995, Brendan Eich invented the language for Netscape. During the dot.JS conference in 2018, Eich said he worked 10 days straight. Using HTML code directly inside the web page, unlike Java which was a professional language where you would run real code with type declarations, and you must write in a way that compiles.” Eich also told Computer’s Charles Severance that, “the name is a lie.” It is not so much related to Java so much as to a common ancestor, C, in syntax.”
It was “a rush job,” Eich said, but he also made the language very malleable, knowing there would be mistakes and gaps.
