[jahewson]

This is a poorly written opinion piece from someone who isn't a JavaScript developer. Most arguments he makes have no facts to back them up. Many of his claims are made from a position of obvious ignorance: many Fortune 500 companies do in fact use JavaScript, and an incredible number of startups do. To claim otherwise is just ridiculous. He claims that games could never use JS and yet WebGL has already given us this.

So what industry-favourite, startup-embraced, wildly popular language does this author advocate?

Smalltalk.

Seriously?

[horrido]

So who's making arguments without supporting facts? The Hacker Life provides evidence that startups prefer Ruby, C and Python. Fortune 500 companies may use JS for client-facing web UI applications (which are generally not mission-critical), but for heavy-duty shit, they'll stick to Java, C#, Python, C++, etc. Show me what Fortune 500 companies are replacing these tried-and-true workhorses with JavaScript.

As for games, what serious gaming platform relies on WebGL? Most games are written in C++ for a reason: maximum performance. When I was Project Team Leader of the Windows NT Driver Group at ATI Technologies (now AMD), all the OpenGL software I saw was written in C++. JavaScript could never have been usable, even with V8.

Smalltalk, seriously. It's still used today around the world by many businesses. Cincom and GemTalk are major Smalltalk vendors. I have friends working at Cherniak Software and Simberon, both important Smalltalk software houses. ESUG (European Smalltalk User Group) is a mammoth organization representing hundreds of companies using Smalltalk. What did you say about "a position of obvious ignorance?"

[reitanqild]

> This is a poorly written opinion piece from someone who isn't a JavaScript developer.

I've written serious things in JS (ok, ECMA Script) back before a lot of people around here started coding it seems. Back when IE ruled the web and SVG was an Adobe plugin to IE.

And I say this post isn't too bad.