[InclinedPlane]

Javascript and Java manifest their defects differently. Javascript has its own special deployment problems (largely due to history not just intrinsic problems) but for the most part its defects surface as surprising behavior in certain specific cases (unusual truth tables to be sure, but hardly unfathomable), these can bite you but once known they can be avoided and worked around. Java's faults generally manifest as limitations to what you can do. This makes Java seem more polished but the result in practice has been the generation of quite a lot of ugly and cumbersome code to work around those limitations, this is not a good thing.

Java is not a bad language, but its limitations have led to a lot of bad engineering. Javascript is far from perfect, but its core elegance has led to increasingly sophisticated and increasingly powerful uses of the language. In another, say, 10 years the state of Java development will almost certainly continue the status quo of today, whereas the state of javascript development is likely to have considerably advanced.

[swannodette]

  > but its core elegance has led to increasingly 
  > sophisticated and increasingly powerful uses 
  > of the language

Huh? What are these uses of JavaScript that are increasingly sophisticated and powerful? This JavaScripter wants to know!

  > whereas the state of javascript development 
  > is likely to have considerably advanced.

If JavaScript continues to advance at the lightning pace it's been advancing these past ten years we'll be in exactly the same spot we are now!

[BrendanEich]

I'll let someone else cite sophisticated and powerful JS uses.

On the language evolution front: the http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:proposals features are very likely to be in the next edition, by end of 2013. Some are already implemented in Firefox.

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:strawman contains the full laundry list of possible additions, but among those, http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modul... is worth calling out. The module system is likely to be a major feature of the next version of the standard.

JavaScript's standard stalled after ECMA-262 3rd Edition, but that was pretty much because of the IE monopoly and the death of Netscape. All web standards stalled, or went off to XML la-la land.

That was then (1999-2004). Since Firefox restarted browser competition in 2004; then with Safari, the iPhone, etc.; and since 2008 with Google Chrome, which clearly provoked major work in IE9; things are moving again, and standards bodies (still dysfunctional in some hard-to-fix ways) are more balanced than ever in terms vendor representation.

So yeah, the next ten years seem likely to be be different from the last ten.

Not only due to browser competition, but also from the Bell's Law device shift to always-connected, instant-on mobile and away from desktop, indicated above via "Safari, the iPhone, etc."

Some fear this shift means non-interoperable, siloed apps and closed app-stores will dominate, but my money is still on the Web. The Web can evolve to have better apps and stores too, provided browser and Web platform markets remain competitive.

[BrendanEich]

I realized after making this comment that some people, swannodette included, were not aware of ES5, which my pointing to Harmony overlooked. ES5 support is almost there in the latest browsers:

http://kangax.github.com/es5-compat-table/

It does not fill some of the big gaps left in JS (no module system, that's coming in Harmony), but it helps and it got the standards committee back together (sans Adobe).

[prodigal_erik]

I fear this shift means non-interoperable siloed apps which happen to be written in JavaScript and deployed via HTTP. The open web of repurposable semantic markup that lives at a permanent URL is eroding.

[gruseom]

Huh? What are these uses of JavaScript that are increasingly sophisticated and powerful?

Uh, any web app? Gmail? Google Maps? The one I'm working on? Surely we don't need to make a list.

If JavaScript continues to advance at the lightning pace it's been advancing these past ten years we'll be in exactly the same spot we are now!

That's incorrect. The language didn't need to change much. The two things that have changed are so major they couldn't be majorer: (1) it took people 10 years to actually figure out what they had in JS; (2) the implementations needed to catch up. While 1 may be more or less done, 2 is still in full swing. This will enable further innovation. It's not even clear we need major changes to the language itself. I'd be much more excited if the VMs were opened up to apps.

[InclinedPlane]

"What are these uses of JavaScript that are increasingly sophisticated and powerful?"

JQuery and node.js alone are perfect examples.