The Stack Overflow 2022 Developer Survey report states that JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for the tenth year in a row, and is now used by over 65% of developers. But Douglas Crockford, the father of JSON, said in a recent interview that JavaScript has become an obstacle to progress.
"The best thing we can do with JavaScript today is to retire it. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few advocates of JavaScript. The combination of nested functions and dynamic objects is brilliant. I spent ten years trying to correct Its flaws. I had small success with ES5. But since then there has been a lot of interest in further augmenting the Stack Overflow 2022 developer survey reporting language rather than making it better. So JavaScript like other ancient languages has become an obstacle to progress. We should focus on the next language, which should look more like E than JavaScript."
E, which Crockford chose to replace JavaScript, was an object-oriented language designed for secure computing; the language was co-created by himself, Mark Millerde, and others. In Crockford's words, it "eliminates a lot of the bad parts of Java".
According to the introduction, Brendan Eich invented JavaScript for Netscape in just 10 days in 1995. "In May, I did 10 days of hard work and I didn't sleep much." "I made a programming language for HTML for web designers and programmers to embed directly into web pages, and the name is a complete lie," Eich said. "It's not much to do with Java, it's in the is syntactically related to a common ancestor C". And said it was "a rush job and I knew there would be bugs, there would be gaps, so I made it a very malleable language. This allowed web developers to make it what they wanted. look."
But along the way, Crockford points out that JavaScript has grown more complex with added functionality, far from Eich's original concept. Also, many web developers don't write JavaScript, instead, they write TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript. TypeScript was invented by Anders Hejlsberg of Microsoft because JavaScript's malleability and lack of type safety made it unsuitable for large-scale applications.
TypeScript also topped the Stack Overflow survey. WebAssembly, a binary format that can be targeted by languages including C, C++, C#, and Rust, is another innovation that could undermine JavaScript's dominance.
One developer stated in a discussion on Hacker News, "JavaScript has exploded in popularity in just a few short years. Yes, the ecosystem is complex. Even among full-time JS developers, this is An ironic phenomenon, how crazy it has become. We can't keep up."
Crockford also pointed out that JavaScript will be difficult to convert, especially since it is the language that every browser supports for DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation. When asked if there was anything that could replace it in the foreseeable future, Crockford said he had always hoped it could, but in fact, there were two difficulties: "First, we don't have a language yet. It needs to be specialized in A minimal-capability-based actor language designed for secure distributed programming. Second, we need all browser makers to adopt it, while replacing the DOM with a well-designed interface."
In this regard, some netizens on Reddit also expressed their opinions:
- As Douglas said before, the DOM is a horrible abstraction for creating applications. It is designed for text documents. The modern use case of the web is hacked by a technology that is fundamentally designed to properly support a more limited purpose.
- The real solution is to replace every browser's DOM API with something for rendering 2D/3D graphics, taking discoverability, accessibility, and machine readability into account. This new engine can use any new language appropriately designed to handle this use case. The concept or website will change in this way. It can be an application via
udp/tcp. - I believe JS is a symptom, not a problem. The limitation of the browser concept itself is the problem, it doesn't match the purpose for which we use it.
Finally
Thanks for reading. I am looking forward to your following and reading more high-quality articles.