JavaScript is Dead. Long Live JavaScript

* Javascript has some warts, and here are some examples.

* It's going to take way too long to get these fixed to the point that we can actually start using new versions of Javascript because of slow browser adoption.

* To get around this problem, people are treating Javascript as a compilation target for other languages, the most prominent example being CoffeeScript.

* Discussion follows of features that would make Javascript better serve its increasing role as a compilation target.

* There is discussion of Harmony throughout.

Sometimes offering a TLDR indicates that the article isn't worth reading "so here are the author's points so you can skip it". That's not the case here. For example, I learned about "Tennet's Correspondence Principle", which helps to give a name to the different ways procs/blocks and methods/lambdas behave in Ruby, as explained in this article[1].

[1] http://www.robertsosinski.com/2008/12/21/understanding-ruby-...

BTW an easy way to produce traditional class inheritance in Javascript is to have a single instance from the class you're trying to inherit from, as the prototype. (To work properly that object should be "abstract": have no ties to any physical resources, like a browser widget, a database handle or a file handle.)

Mozilla introduced this back in Firefox 2, and you can replace var with it, so TFAA's

    for (var i=0, ilen=elements.length; i

    for (let i=0, ilen=elements.length; i

    elements.forEach(function (element, i) {
        LIB_addEventListener(element, function(event) {
            alert('I was originally number ' + i);
        });
    });