I assume you are talking about GUIs over TCP/IP, in which case a large part of the reason is the mismatch between what is used by most GUI software versus what

I assume you are talking about GUIs over TCP/IP, in which case a large part of the reason is the mismatch between what is used by most GUI software versus what we use over TCP. Most of the best ideas get voted down, and there is no agreement about how high level or low level the language should be. As an example, see what I wrote in “The problem with HTML” http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html It’s worth remembering that Swing has been stable for awhile, after a terrible era when new layouts were being proposed every 6 months. And Flash had a long era , nearly 20 years, of remaining mostly the same (though ActionScript 3 was a significant change compared to version 2). There has been a lot of talk about generating GUIs as pure SVG, but this hasn’t happened yet. Is that too low level? There has been some talk of generating GUIs with PostScript, but that hasn’t happened yet. Is that too low level? I suspect change will be constant until the industry reaches some consensus about what level causes the least pain. I don’t believe Javascript will survive. Eventually this current era will be a bad memory and we will laugh about Javascript the way we now laugh about Swing and ActionScript.