Re:How to Pick a Language
by jballanc on Friday January 23, 2009 @11:24PM
(#447745)
Javascript is a bit of an enigma. Usually, bad languages are made better (or at least tolerable) by the existence of good libraries (see C++, Perl). In the case of Javascript, it's a really elegant language made worse by being so often so dependent on the DOM and all of it's obscurities.
I admire Javascript because it covers so many paradigms, and yet is, at the core, very simple and straightforward. Much as Lisp is to lists, Javascript is to hashes. Also, there are some really interesting projects in early stages that are taking Javascript out of the browser. For example, when Google released the code for v8, Marc-André Cournoyer from the Ruby community slapped together a project that translated Ruby to JS and ran it through v8 (http://macournoyer.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/ruby-on-v8/).
Finally, I think it's worth noting that if you believe the "cloud" is the future, then Javascript is the de facto machine code of the "cloud"...
I admire Javascript because it covers so many paradigms, and yet is, at the core, very simple and straightforward. Much as Lisp is to lists, Javascript is to hashes. Also, there are some really interesting projects in early stages that are taking Javascript out of the browser. For example, when Google released the code for v8, Marc-André Cournoyer from the Ruby community slapped together a project that translated Ruby to JS and ran it through v8 (http://macournoyer.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/ruby-on-v8/).
Finally, I think it's worth noting that if you believe the "cloud" is the future, then Javascript is the de facto machine code of the "cloud"...