Why We Should Stop Using JavaScript According to Douglas Crockford (Inventor of JSON)

This is typical human behaviour. Build something shit that kind of works. Tell everyone about it and get them to use it. Encounter externalities, scaling issues, etc. Apply bandaid. Achieve critical mass. Oops, too big to fail / sunk cost is too great to switch.

Stuck with it now.exe

Transcript:

20 years ago, I was advocating for JavaScript. My story was that JavaScript is a much better language than anybody knows and that if we use it properly we can do amazing things about it and it can change the world and in fact, that happened.

But now my evangel is that we should stop using JavaScript. That it has so many congenital defects it really is a smelly language. There's just a lot of crap in it.

And it's still maybe for its field of application the best language in the world for doing that kind of stuff but that's not good enough. We should be moving on to the next generation of languages.

It used to be that we'd get new computer languages about every generation. I started with Fortran and then C and C++ and Java and JavaScript and so on and then it kind of stopped. There are still people developing languages but nobody cares. One person can make a programming language, a really good one, but you can't get adoption for it.

There are lots of terrible mistakes in the way that the web works, in the way our operating systems work, and we can't get new ones. We're just stuck with this crap and they keep piling new features on everything and the new features always create new problems and it doesn't have to be like that. We could be using really clean operating systems with really clean languages and really clean runtimes and doing all this stuff in a much more reliable way. But we don't seem to want to do that.

I've done JavaScript for a generation. It's time for the next thing. And I don't think that should be considered a radical point of view. I think it should be a normal evolutionary view.

I bolded main points

Thank you! I'm rarely browsing Lemmy at a place or time to watch videos.

He also wrote the best book for JavaScript, JavaScript: The Good Parts.

JS is pretty bad, but it's so ubiquitous now that I don't know if anyone can create a replacement with enough traction for one of the big browsers to start supporting it.

Web assembly is catching on, which can theoretically be compiled from any language.

It's not exactly the same, since you're not dealing with the classic Layout+Style+Behavior model of HTML, CSS, and JS, but it's becoming pretty powerful and a few UI frameworks already support it.
- Are there any big projects that are switching JavaScript for Web Assembly?
I think it'd be possible to create a replacement, assuming you're a large company that ships your own browser (not naming names...). If you have enough market share/"killer apps" then it might be adopted (maybe?).

Now, ditching JS is a whole nother ballgame, and yeah, I don't see that happening any time soon!
- One of them tried it, they had a Monopoly and tried to push their Basic (not naming names) but it didn't take off. I can't believe I am saying this but I kinda wish it had worked.
It will happen eventually. Look at FORTRAN, or COBOL, or BASIC, or Pascal, or even Objective-C.

Adoption is a feature you can't design.

People don't choose Javascript because it's good.

Dude's right about javascript. For his talk about OSes and other languages… I dunno, I think progress is happening there even though he acts like it's not. Rust is picking up steam, on linux at least. OS progress is hard to gauge in the Windowsphere though, especially with MS mostly progressing the malware aspects these days.

What happened to Dart?

It missed the target
It's a pity Dart didn't become the standard.
Dart for web just transpiles to JavaScript, doesn't it?

Always love blaming the tool instead of the hands that use it

Are you aware of the work of Douglas Crockford?

Why We Should Stop Using JavaScript According to Douglas Crockford (Inventor of JSON) - YouTube