Complicating matters further is that "best" languages probably don't exist: or rather, the best option is likely a combination of apps and frameworks written in

Complicating matters further is that "best" languages probably don't exist: or rather, the best option is likely a combination of apps and frameworks written in different languages. Plus there are lots of languages that compile to JavaScript now, which means you could support "isomorphic" apps and still use a language your team might be familiar with. This all just complicates things further. I agree this is more about people not caring about all possible use cases because they focus on the performance of just one browser or just one platform to get a working app. It's hard to move from working proof-of-concept app to a fully-developed product that you can build on in future that is entirely multi-device and cross-browser. Then once the technical details are in place, ask yourself if you're building "the right product" and you really do need an entire team. I'm not entirely sure I'd blame over-reliance on client-side programming however. To me that's a symptom not the cause. It'd be like blaming CSS Media Queries for the fact that most mobile sites purposefully hide functionality and are less useable on phones than their desktop counterparts. The problem isn't the technology in as much as it's a lack of understanding in how it can be best applied. There is progress however. It used to be we had lots of websites putting text in images, using tables for layouts, or using JavaScript for interactive drop-downs. It's nice to know that as an industry, over a decade, we moved from 0% CSS to everyone using CSS and perhaps over-using it. I'm sure within the next decades we'll see an emphasis on all good practices, until the point where the web is again unrecognizable: just as today's developers probably wouldn't know where to start with spacer.gifs, it's possible in future we'd question anyone who doesn't serve pre-rendered HTML with modular JS serving for performance reasons. Either that, or SPDY makes it all unnecessary. I'm of two minds ;-)