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by nikolay·11y ago·view on hn ↗
Well, JavaScript became popular, because it was omnipresent and was simple (so that even Web Designers without a Computer Science degree could use it). Now, there are vast differences between browsers and the toolchain has grown huge.

We need to revisit the scripting in browsers. Instead of twisting arms to use "JavaScript", because of it "universality", we should focus on WebAssembly and the likes. Have a safe scripting VM in the browser, use any language that compiles to it - no need for Babel and the likes.

2 comments
> we should [...]

No, again, you're reforming "I would like..." into "we should". There's no should about it.

JavaScript is nowadays quite a nice language. ES2015 and the way forward gives us a language that could happily go for another 20 years with few issues.

WebAssembly doesn't solve the problem btw - most of the things people hate on JS about (that aren't just dumb "I don't like loose typing or understand prototypical inheritance" complaints anyhow) are to do with how it integrates with the key web feature: the DOM.

DOM is where everything goes to hell on the web and it's going to be just as much of a mess in C/Rust/Haskell/Clojure/brainfuck as it is in JavaScript.

Also your comment about Babel is just strange. The reason to use Babel is to support older parsers that only understand ES5 syntax. That's never going to go away. We'll be dealing with older parsers for 10 years after WebAssembly launches - so guess what? Now your toolchain got longer, more complex, and you still have to output JavaScript anyhow.

Yaaaaaay.

Or, you know, you could learn JavaScript properly and realize that it's a completely useful and great language that is just as good as whatever your pet favorite is when applied to the tasks at hand.

People have been revisiting scripting in browsers for 15+ years. The hard part isn't getting everyone to revisit scripting in browsers. That's the easy part. If Google couldn't make it happen despite their efforts with Dart, I don't who else could. :( The push wouldn't come from the W3C either. I suspect that in 5-10 years, we will have a safe scripting VM in the browser, but it's still going to be JavaScript.