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> JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there > I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything Lol

• jerf 10y ago
  To be fair, JS does have a pretty good trajectory. When you start from near the absolute bottom, there's nowhere to go but up. I do not mean that as a crack against the language; it is an observation that even JS partisans ought to agree with if they think for a moment. I'm looking back all the way to its creation, when it was a language designed to handle onclick events that fit into one attribute tag. There was a lot of up to go from there. However, looking into the future and seeing where a language with Javascript's technical foundation can end up, it's hard to see it ever exceeding Python 3 or Ruby, and both of those languages, while perhaps not in outright decline, are certainly looking at having peaked and entering their "maturity" phase. Confident declarations that it is the future are probably not warranted when it is at most the present. I don't think WebAssembly will "kill" Javascript any time soon, but once it really gets going it's going to start eating away at all the really big uses of it, because WebAssembly will permit languages that can fit into niches other than the 1990s-style dynamic language maxima. It's a nice maxima (totally no sarcasm, I'm just barely old enough to have tasted the paradigms it replaced and dynamic languages got as big as they did for a reason) but it's now in 2016 also abundantly clear it's not the only one.