Re:JavaScript's world domination
by flaki on Tuesday March 24, 2015 @07:05PM
(#9260168)
According to Brendan Eich (http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript...), early on JavaScript was inspired by Scheme and the initial plan was to create a language that was "Scheme in the browser". :)
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I prefer Common Lisp, but I can only dream about how wonderful Scheme in the browser would have been. JavaScript is hideous, simply hideous: it's a hack, piled atop a thousand compromises, wrapped up in a million curly brackets.
Every time I use JavaScript I imagine how good life could have been were it Scheme. Every time I have to use JSON I imagine how great life would have been were we using canonical S-expressions[1] instead. There's one good thing—and only one good thing—about JavaScript: it's incredibly well-deployed. As another commenter mentioned, JavaScript is an object lesson in path dependency.
In many ways, it's appropriate that it has 'Java' in the name: it's popular, but it's ugly. There are better languages; indeed, nearly every other non-Turing-tarpit language is better than either Java or JavaScript: Lua, Lisp, TCL, Python, Rebol, Erlang.