Your users don't care about your opinion of Javascript's syntax.

More focus on Javascript and the tools available will only help improve the language faster, and I believe Flash has already made a huge impact (good!) on the Javascript language.

Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?

I agree though that it would be awesome if adobe created a suite of Javascript products that focused on developing creative content in a similar way to what flash did.

I think the reasons most people hate flash are that the platform itself works poorly on anything other than windows , this could be fixed in part by Adobe simply open sourcing the flash VM.

The other reason is that lots of flash developers used the platform to create crap like flash intros and obnoxious advertising , that won't exactly go away with HTML5/JS.

I'm not just hoping I'm counting on Adobe or someone delivering a good Javascript IDE that mimics OOP design, and I'm keeping an eye on Google's Dart project, but even after that I'm not expecting the experience to be nearly as smooth or creatively liberating as Flash.

This meant that even somebody using IE6 can have a good experience with a flash app, assuming their flash is upto date.

What annoys me with HTML5/JS apps is I constantly see people showing off demos of something cool they did with the "open" HTML5/JS tools. Then I load their demo and it's all like "hey, sorry your not using the latest version of Chrome come back when you've installed it"

Hopefully this will get better over time , but you've still got IE dragging it's feet and doing things a bit differently + Microsoft's habit of dropping support for new versions in older OSes.

Maybe the answer is for all browsers to just standardize on one rendering engine / JS implementation otherwise I can see this becoming a nightmare and everyone having to keep multiple versions of multiple browsers installed just to run all the apps they need.

Heh, this would be an ideal situation, but good luck trying to get them to agree on that. The browser wars are not over yet, who knows if they ever will be.

We thought that the Web would be that final platform that would give us the ability to write our app once, and then make it available instantly on all operating systems. Well, technically, we got that. Except now we have to worry about browser incompatibilities. We didn't solve the problem of cross-platform compatibility. We just have a different set of platforms today.

What wee need is a language that will do for web development what Java has done for development in general in 90s - something that will allow us to write our apps once, and have them display perfectly on all major browsers. But seeing that this magical language would probably also need to support arcane versions of various browsers I don't see that happening any time soon.

I thought we did have that and it was called gasp Java!

Plus not having the structure as part of the standard will make iterative development a nightmare. Instead of being reliant on a proprietary runtime (like Flash Player) we are reliant on proprietary compilers and libraries. How is that better?

That would be welcomed with open arms. But why not continue to use Flash until this comes around, instead of slowly killing it without a decent replacement?

Though I never used Flash professionally, it has been the most fun to use for games and any other side projects that involve some sort of visual control. JavaScript isn't even close yet.

What would really be cool is if you could target VM's using whatever language you want (including statically typed languages like Java and AS3. The JVM and AVM did it, so I don't see why V8/etc can't). Javascript should not have a monopoly on the VM.

I know Javascript, your comment suggests you don't know ActionScript's history: AS1 was an ECMASscript language just like JS, so to that end it was actually literally the same language as JS running in a different environment with a different API. The latest iteration of JS has hardly changed since then, whereas AS1 evolved into AS2 then AS3, which is now a much more advanced OOP language, and it's still evolving. Going from AS3 to JS is literally like going backwards in time.

You can get quite far on the way to strict typing with a good IDE like jetbrains. It has very thorough 'compile time' checks (while editing). I almost don't miss strict typing when writing large pieces of javascript in jetbrains.