[taeric]

What JavaScript does right, is to have an installed VM on basically every computer out there. If you are building a consumer focused thing, it is hard to argue for any other installation method. Especially when you consider you can remove the need to track multiple deployments in the same way, since you can basically force an update to all users.

[ttfkam]

Microsoft had VBScript installed on >90% of all browsers at one time. Google almost installed Dart by default in Chrome and then walked it back. Java was installed on all browsers for a decade, but no one wanted it. WebAssembly allows for languages like Rust to be used, but its adoption is still very niche.

JavaScript lives on. It's not just inertia. IE for example supported multiple languages at the same time. As a lingua franca, JS is simply better than the alternatives.

Python is subjectively cleaner than JS, but it isn't sufficiently better to warrant replacing JS, especially after JS started becoming more Pythonic. Lua is arguably a step backwards. Go adds a necessary compile step. Folks already gave Java a shot. C/C++ was a hard-learned lesson after ActiveX regarding web security. Perl ain't gonna be it obviously. Rust has a much too steep learning curve for the vast majority of web developers to tolerate. Ruby is slower and also not sufficiently better.

I know folks don't like to hear it, but JavaScript is nowhere near as bad as folks like to go on about it. In fact it's so flexible, an entire ecosystem rose up around it on the server side more than a decade after its client-side debut. If JS were really that bad, no one would adopt it for other areas if they didn't have to. It is familiar and gets the job done. We only highlight its shortcomings because we've had almost 30 years to pick it apart and dissect it.

Google could team up with Apple and make Swift a supported language. Within 2 years, it would be on >90%+ of all devices. Maybe 95%. And it wouldn't matter. Sure, a bunch of folks would use it, especially if they were Apple devs. But the vast majority would ask, "What would this new language give me that JS can't do? Is it actually worth rewriting apps and retraining my staff?" Honestly, the answer is 'no'.

Because JS really isn't bad. It has warts (though many/most of them due to the DOM rather than the language). It has legacy. But after 30 years, it's still doing surprisingly well at both speed, flexibility, and the ability to evolve.

[taeric]

This is taking some liberties with "installed." Java was never meaningfully installed on all machines. Such that getting it to work was surprisingly difficult for most users. You could maybe argue that Flash was well entrenched, but I don't think that would get too many objections. Indeed, many early Flash sites were better at interactivity than many modern sites.

VBScript, I'm almost willing to cede. That said, I don't remember it ever being a thing that websites tried to use. Even back in the days of them ripping off Sun with JScript. I'm also curious when they had 90% of the browsers with it? Would love to see a solid timeline on that.

Note, too, that I never pushed that JavaScript is bad on this. Indeed, I agree with you that it is nowhere near as bad as is often stated. What it lacks, is discipline. Which is why it seems to have near every paradigm accounted for nowadays.

That said, /if/ Google teamed up with Apple and got that pushed on all devices for native, I suspect you would see it leak into the browsers in that 2 years and that we would indeed start seeing more Swift developers at large. And a ton of "reasons you should migrate to Swift" for your websites.

[ttfkam]

You probably misremember. Java was indeed installed on effectively all browser-capable machines from 1997-200x. All you needed was an <applet> tag, not an <object> or <embed> like other plugins like Flash. Speaking of Flash, it came preloaded for a time, but mostly rode the ActiveX wave for installs. You could not count on it being installed though. I vividly remember the fallback markup when it was unavailable.

Internet Explorer had 90% marketshare in the years around 2004. Netscape was dead. Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox was a hopeful, not a contender. VBScript was everywhere IE was, and folks still preferred JS, even if their sites proudly proclaimed "Best viewed with Internet Explorer". In the late 1990s/early 2000s, MSDN was full of examples pushing VBScript. It became second nature to myself and coworkers to just reason out what the equivalent JS looked like on the fly. Microsoft absolutely tried its best to replace JS, but devs wouldn't have it, and the number of JS-powered sites was just too large for Microsoft to simply drop compatibility.

It was around that time that Microsoft stopped making updates of any kind to Internet Explorer for years. Folks today really don't comprehend the debt we hold to Mozilla for breaking out of the notion that the web was feature complete.

[taeric]

No, I remember quite well how that never worked as well as you'd have wanted it to. So, yes, there was an installation of java. No, it probably didn't work correctly. Worse, it was probably not updated. With no real path on how to update for most folks.

Such that, yes it was "installed," but it was about like relying on vanilla JavaScript back then. Which you didn't do. You pulled in jquery or whatever and monkey patched some sanity into the environment. Something you couldn't do with Java.

VB had the odd curse of being VB. Everyone was certain that MS wanted it dead, and everyone also knew that if you were writing a VB application, you might as well just make it directly in Access. Which, granted, wasn't a bad solution for a lot of things.

[emodendroket]

The big difference is we’re talking about it working on many devices, plus a lot of people have very bitter memories of Windows XP deprecation breaking apps. And you seem to be contradicting your own thesis here, since people saying “this isn’t so much better to justify rewrites and retraining” is precisely inertia.

[emodendroket]

Yeah, I agree. Whether you like it is almost beside the point. And then eventually people do start to like it through familiarity and tons of investment going into it and the momentum is tough to stop.