As a language, I feel like Javascript decided to repeat half the mistakes Perl made and to tack on a few unique ones of its own. Supposedly the latest version,

As a language, I feel like Javascript decided to repeat half the mistakes Perl made and to tack on a few unique ones of its own. Supposedly the latest version, ECMAScript 3, improves on javascript a lot, but in the end I would pick Python or Ruby over javascript any day. The section about javascript at http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m... is funny because it is true! It's too bad that Javascript has become the assembly of the web. I've found GWT to be a terribly leaky abstraction. I've watched as projects like HotRuby stalled and faded. And I've seen projects like the scala version of j2js grapple with performance issues such as inefficient method call overhead in current javascript implementations. I really believe that javascript at this point is holding back progress on the web. I really hope something like google's NACL succeeds where all the other RIA frameworks have failed. To do so, it is going to have to integrate with the browser much better than applets, flash, etc, but if it succeeds it could allow for a multi-language renaissance on the client that would benefit everyone and force javascript to actually compete with the rest of the PL world.