Doug Crockford at the TC-39 panel last night talked about how one of the most exciting things about JavaScript is that its a wildly successful general-purpose p

Doug Crockford at the TC-39 panel last night talked about how one of the most exciting things about JavaScript is that its a wildly successful general-purpose programming language that "doesn't have to look like C to be successful." His point was that we used to live in a software ecosystem where the conventional wisdom was that if a programming language didn't look like C, it wasn't going to take off. JavaScript (and even more so variants like CoffeeScript) are showing that we've moved on from that sentiment. In some ways, this article feels like a retreat to that older assumption. As if we somehow are expected to be searching for ways to work C into the modern web app landscape. Perhaps this point may somewhat orthogonal to the topic of the article and the related discussion, but I can't help but ask what problems are we solving by going back to C for web development? Is the assumed performance gain going to outweigh all the other benefits of using a higher level abstraction? None of the framework examples listed in the article really seem elegant at all when compared to higher level counterparts (Rails, Django, Spring, et al). Of course, I'm saying this without having attempted to build an application with any of them.