This article is obviously a random snapshot of some impressions the author has. But this line strikes me a grossly unfair. > The web development community cons

This article is obviously a random snapshot of some impressions the author has. But this line strikes me a grossly unfair. > The web development community consciously chose to stick with a pathetically crippled technology to avoid having to change. The JavaScript language has its limitations and crufty (but standardized) aspects. But calling JavaScript pathetically crippled tells me the author has no clue. And saying that the web development community to to stick with it to avoid having to change shows even more ignorance. The web development community has chosen to go with JavaScript in the ECMA-262 form because it is open, standardized and runs in every browser. The alternative would have been (and still is) choosing a language on a proprietary runtime. Because, yeah, that would have been good for the open web, standards and end-users, right? JavaScript is actually quite powerful. I do a lot of JS programming and have built sophisticated systems in it. What's hard about JS programming is interacting with the host environment (primarily the DOM and loading structures). Building complex and powerful pieces of code in JS is much, much easier than doing the same in Java or C#, both of which have been shoehorned into the browser (though comparing these languages with JS is not fair or even very relevant). JS is a standard and it's in every browser. This means we can program complex client-side applications that will run even an ancient browser like IE6 (which is, unfortunately still standard for business). And we do. I've loaded our main application into Opera on the Wii and Safari on the iPhone without modifications. I've even had it running on the OLPC candy box. Good luck trying that with Silverlight, AIR, or what have you. I'm all for having multiple languages for platform-independent development. But I currently don't see any other language than JS as an option. If you're going to moan and whine about how JS sucks, please provide other reasons than some arbitrary aspect of the language while ignoring all the positive aspects. And if you're going to accuse web developers in general of laziness, please provide alternatives. Money, you know where to put it, right?