For now. I get the feeling that soon enough a lot of them will start dying out. Trying to "sell" some language other than JS in a mostly-JS shop is already an impossible battle. Popularity is used as a counter-argument for everything.
I was just thinking that the Javascript community saw that the Ruby community were both snobs and well respected, assumed a causal link, and thought they just needed to be snobs for people to respect Javascript.
Better javascript would be incompatible with javascript - best you can get will be "less sucking javascript". And you'll be able to use it somewhere in the far future, after four competing companies have implemented enough of it in a way that mostly works, their browsers have reached most of the internet and the brave open source community has developed the polyfills needed to fix the incompatibilities.
I'm not holding my breath. Javascript sucks, it will be everywhere and we are stuck with it.
I'm totally with you. JS is such a bad language, might get better in the future with ES<X> but I guess not. It has many quick hacks (in the bad sense), admitted by it's author.
Interesting pattern I see lately is industry pundits on the CIO side advocate Javascript for inhouse tooling. I guess they have not much experience with programming languages.
With JS making inroads into CIO territory, we'll see a much higher usage in the future. And a much larger fallout with tons of unmaintainable legacy code.
It's like the times when everything needed Java, like Oracle added Java into their DBs for stored procedures. I guess Oracle will add JS too (or have they already?).
By better choices you mean better languages or other methods of achieving the same flexibility without the complexity of a language like JS? Can you reply with examples? I am interested in alternatives to JS and LUA.
For now. I get the feeling that soon enough a lot of them will start dying out. Trying to "sell" some language other than JS in a mostly-JS shop is already an impossible battle. Popularity is used as a counter-argument for everything.