Wrong Again
October 24, 2007 – 12:41 pmI’ve been saying for a while now that Javascript—sorry, ECMAScript—has a good shot at being the hottest general-purpose scripting language in the world five years from now. After looking through the 4th Edition Language Overview, I’d like to temper that bold assertion. The language is now as complicated as Ruby or Python, maybe even more so, and I think that’s going to be a significant barrier to wider adoption. On the other hand, Yukihiro Matsumoto might have been right when he said (in Beautiful Code) that:
Simplicity is one of the most misunderstood concepts in programming. People who design languages frequently want to keep those languages simple and clean. While the sentiment is noble, doing this can make programs written in that language more complex.
We’ll all find out soon enough…
One Response to “Wrong Again”
I would just like to point out that in support of your idea of ECMAScript as the Next Big Language, I discovered that the last version of Qt use it as an application scripting language:
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/qtscript.html#details
So maybe you are not wrong already
By Erick Lavoie on Oct 25, 2007