| 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. |
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).