> It's damning that you say it took 20 years for us to "start" to leverage JavaScript's power. If that's true, then Lisp is surely triply damned, as it's older

> It's damning that you say it took 20 years for us to "start" to leverage JavaScript's power. If that's true, then Lisp is surely triply damned, as it's older than 60 and it's safe to say that most working programmers in the industry don't know how to leverage its power. Or, since you brought up Ruby, the industry by and large didn't care about its existence for roughly the first decade of its life, though I suppose that's only half-damned. One might reasonably conclude that what a language has to offer is only tenuously connected to whether a critical mass of industrial programmers knows how to work in it and take advantage of everything it has. > Compare to C#, which appeared 15 years ago, or Go which is from 2009, or Swift, which hasn't even celebrated its first birthday yet. Since a comparison has been invited: - C# is an iteration of an iteration of an already industry accepted paradigm (and the first iteration's uptake is considerably more impressive). - Go is more or less the same thing, except they took out a lot of industry accepted paradigms (and enough people are actually complaining loudly about some of the removed bits that I think Go's uptake is going to plateau more quickly). - Swift is a super interesting case and maybe the best comparison to JS of all of these -- familiar syntax but with enough differences that are going to be unfamiliar that some developers would probably freak out and resist... if its only real competition weren't Objective C (so of course it's doing well :b) and its target market weren't already familiar with the underlying Cocoa libraries (which are almost 30 now). - C# and Swift were both released by deeply entrenched market-bendingly powerful industry patrons who were decades old (this shoe nearly fits golang, too). By contrast, JavaScript was released by a company barely a year old in an emerging market. A partner (another decades old entrenched player) of the neophyte company wanted the language nerfed and positioned as a toy, and got some of what it wanted. It was created very quickly. Within a year or two of release, tens of thousands of amateurs and professionals were doing something with it, most without having ever bothered to learn the specifics of the language at all. Within five years, thousands were actually doing reasonably complex applications with it. At about 10 years (right around the age Rails mania starts to hit the industry, right?) is when some significant portion of the industry starts to take notice that things like Google Maps can be built and (some) people start to consider that maybe if they actually took the time to learn the language and platform, they could do neat things too.... I'd say JavaScript fares pretty well by a number of standards for comparison. Not to say it couldn't be improved; it is being improved. Better error messages and stack traces are great ideas, type hinting could work out too.