[pedrocr]

>The AppStore restrictions are top-down decisions for commercial reasons. >Whereas the web ecosystem has evolved this way. >It's like being cross about how few air-breathing fish there are, and writing to HN to complain.

It was a rant about how things turned out. I'm not expecting anyone to go out and build something I'd like better. But it does surprise that most people think it's OK that an increasingly more important environment is limited to a single language. I was attacking Javascript as a single choice more than Javascript as a language, but I should have probably have made that more explicit as there were plenty of comments about how this was just me not knowing enough Javascript.

>You can write code that compiles to bytecode to run on a browser -- applets, Flash, Silverlight -- but for various evolutionary reasons, none of them have become dominant over JS.

All of those are ways to run code inside a box inside a webpage. None really replace Javascript as a DOM manipulator with a bytecode. I don't think there has ever been any portable option besides Javascript (or emitting Javascript from something else) to do scripting on a page that isn't constrained inside Flash/Applet.

[nervechannel]

I do see what you mean about the lack of choice, although I'd rather have all browsers implement one language consistently and and well, rather than a number of languages flakily and non-universally.

The compiling-to-JS idea has a lot of potential I reckon. I've done a couple of GWT projects and the results work very well, much better than if I'd written the JS myself, and not noticeably slow. And debugging the app in Eclipse is so much nicer than using a JS debugger.