Javascript might have gotten a bad name in the past because of 14-year olds who used it to display 'Welcome to my website!' alerts on their Geocities homepage, but it's really unfair. Javascript is a very flexible and dynamic language that can be written very elegantly.
I urge everyone who still think Javascript is a toy language to read Douglas Crockford's excellent article:
http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html
-- Hay
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 3:50 AM, William Allen Simpsonwilliam.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
Javascript, OMG don't go there.
Don't be so quick to dismiss Javscript. If we were making a scorecard it would likely meet most of the checkboxes:
- Available of reliable battle tested sandboxes (and probably the only
option discussed other than x-in-JVM meeting this criteria)
- Availability of fast execution engines
- Widely known by the existing technical userbase (JS beats the
other options hands down here)
- Already used by many Mediawiki developers
- Doesn't inflate the number of languages used in the operation of the site
- Possibility of reuse between server-executed and client-executed
(Only JS of the named options meets this criteria)
- Can easily write clear and readable code
- Modern high level language features (dynamic arrays, hash tables, etc)
There may exist great reasons why another language is a better choice, but JS is far from the first thing that should be eliminated.
Python is a fine language but it fails all the criteria I listed above except the last two.
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