For a long time, there was no political will to kill Javascript; there was barely enough political will to reform it -- see the Eich vs. Wilson debate [1]. Now

For a long time, there was no political will to kill Javascript; there was barely enough political will to reform it -- see the Eich vs. Wilson debate [1]. Now that JS has seen 2 new versions in 2 years, momentum has picked up and it's keeping up with the times much more so than in the late 2000s when its flaws were glaring and apparent. One of the interesting side-effects of the extra effort going into the web platform is the 'wasm' effort [2] which could replace Javascript at some point -- yes, the usual caveats about GC and DOM apply, but they're coming [3][4]. Though the political line is that wasm isn't intended to replace Javascript, once it attains feature parity (like it's headed towards), it'll be trivial to do so, regardless of what the designers intend. When that time comes, JS will probably still be used as a written language, but wasm will become the new compilation target. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#4th_Edition_.28abandoned.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#4th_Edition_.28aban... [2] https://webassembly.github.io/ https://webassembly.github.io/ [3] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/219 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/219 [4] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md