The Problem with JavaScript

This post by Scott Hanselman got me thinking a bit more about JavaScript. The problem with JavaScript is not what kind of features it has or what it allows to do, but rather the lack of real competition. It’s a de-facto standard and monopoly.

This is both good and bad.

It’s good because you can just learn one language, and you’re done. Add one or two frameworks, and your life is not exactly easy, but decent at least.

It’s bad because innovation comes from competition. And no, Flash and Silverlight are not competitors at all. They don’t allow to script the DOM without first loading large external dependencies, they’re not open (in the broader meaning of the term) and they’re doomed. They’re doomed because there’s JavaScript.

So what?

I don’t know. I just take JavaScript for what it is. I don’t like it very much, mostly because it’s weakly typed. No, that’s not true (I’ve grown used to that). I don’t like it very much because there is no decent IDE for JavaScript. No, that’s not true either. I don’t like it very much because Visual Studio is not that good with JavaScript, although I suspect that no IDE is really good with JavaScript. Sure, I could use another editor, but the cost of continuously switching between two editors would be very high, so that’s not really an option. I just want the same coding experience I have with C#, but with JavaScript (and dynamically-loaded JSON).

In the end, JavaScript is the future. It’s likely that more high-level features will be integrated in the language, but that will happen so slowly that we’ll have to rely on frameworks for a long time anyway. So you might ask, why bother adding new features in the first place? The language itself is good (or bad?) enough already, what is making a difference is the availability of frameworks. Good point.