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I'm not saying to get rid of JS, but it would be nice to have a first class alternative.
It's hard to imagine now, but something will come along that, like web services, finds a slick way to give the folks what they want, performance.
And that innovation will be written in C.
The number of new features added to JavaScript in the past year is substantial. Between Canvas, WebGL, WebSockets, WebWorkers, Audio Data, TouchEvents, the number of permutations of new kinds of browser-based apps you can build will keep anyone busy for years. Then add NodeJS, and CouchDB, and the use of JSON as a data interchange and there are things you can do entirely in JavaScript that no other language can do. I…
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So i'm curious what you mean by "more suitable languages" for writing an mp3 decoder. Also which of Javascript's abstractions are do you think are so inherently unsuitable? As far as general purpose programming languages Javscript does pretty well with regard to object semantics. That's why things like Coffeescript are as powerful as they are. Javascript certainly doesn't have the elegance that say Ruby or Python has…
An example that shows that Javascript wasn't designed for performance: it doesn't support integers. They can be used in some Javascript implementations that do smart tricks to convert float arithmetic to integer arithmetic, but it is not reliable. If you were designing a language for performance in the first place, this would be a ridiculous method to get access to integers. Same for dense arrays. Yeah, JS is pretty…
CoffeeScript incurs no penalty when compiling to Javascript; in fact, in many cases it's faster than handwritten code.
coffeescript - it's just javascript, but with a touch of awesomeness.
And without proper stack traces. Don't get me wrong, I love coffescript, but it clearly is a hack. The internet landscape would look very different if browsers had a standardized bytecode interpreter.
I'd like to see a statically typed language available. There is relatively little I do that requires dynamic typing, but so much of my experience would be better with static typing. I'm not saying to get rid of JS, but it would be nice to have a first class alternative.
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No one language can meet every need. Even if it has been done, Javascript is a terrible language to write an MP3 decoder in, relative to more suitable languages. So if we're continuing to expand what the browser can do, shouldn't we expand what languages we can express them in? Why do we have to write our WebGL programs in Javascript? Javascript isn't a terribly great bytecode language, either, unless you're basicall…
So i'm curious what you mean by "more suitable languages" for writing an mp3 decoder. Also which of Javascript's abstractions are do you think are so inherently unsuitable? As far as general purpose programming languages Javscript does pretty well with regard to object semantics. That's why things like Coffeescript are as powerful as they are. Javascript certainly doesn't have the elegance that say Ruby or Python has…
No, that's the wrong way of thinking about it entirely.
When you create a language, you must unavoidably privilege some ways of thinking and working above others. You must make some things easier, at the expense of making some things harder. There's no one set of answers that works universally.
Suppose I want to make an immutable language. Can I program Javascript purely immutably? Well... sort of. You can try, anyhow, but you'll get no help from the compiler, and any existing libraries will be all but useless, it's really a new language. Suppose I want to prove things in Javascript; with both mutable values and object prototypes that can be freely rewritten at any time, it's infeasible. Suppose I need C++; where's my private variables? Expressable? Sure. Useful? No; Javascript has made them much harder while working on making its object system powerful in different ways. That's not a criticism; a language has to make some things harder when it makes some things easier, to be a criticism I'd have to be calling it a "bad tradeoff", which in most cases it isn't.
It's not whether a thing can be done, it's how well it can be done, and Javascript isn't the best at everything. And "how well" something can be done matters, because the harder you make it, the less likely someone is to do it. No amount of theorizing how that doesn't have to be the case will change that.
There's nothing that any Turing Complete language can't do (with the proper hooks into the machine it's running on, anyhow), but no one language can be the best choice for everything. I wouldn't want to try to make an OS out of Javascript. Now, I personally wouldn't want to try to make one out of C particularly either, but Javascript would be even worse.
So either we lock all those apps out of the browser, or we make them much harder to write than they would be in a language actually suited to them. There's a time for C and a time for assembler and a time for Haskell and a time for C# etc. etc. Languages profoundly affect what gets written in them.
I've tried many different languages, including the real pretty ones such as Ruby and Python, and I just have more fun using JavaScript because of how free-form it is.