Javascript lost a decade because of that. People without an investment in Javascript have lost over a decade because of Javascript's monopoly on clients being

Javascript lost a decade because of that. People without an investment in Javascript have lost over a decade because of Javascript's monopoly on clients being maintained. If we had not been forcibly locked into Javascript all this time, then competition would have produced a better alternative or whipped the process designing Javascript into shape. Now we are stuck with this ridiculously tall, messy stack which uses an application scripting language as a compile target, still lacks basic features like a standard package system, and pushes trivial language features like iteration into third-party libraries like jQuery. So now we are constantly pushing megs of JS, using insanely complicated build systems to get anything done, and for all this trouble our code runs at a speed roughly equivalent to C in 1998. (Now that Flash and Silverlight are dead I think it is safe for me to complain about Javascript without being an enemy of the open internet or whatever.) I don't really care about Dart, but it's way past due that there was something serious to challenge Javascript. All the triumphalism about how Javascript is already a perfect language to use for eternity is explicitly counterproductive. Making the whole internet depend on the fortunes of one language just sucks.