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There will never be a single language to cover all use cases or all preferences, we have 40+ years of computer industry programming to back that up. Whenever someone says "X isn't useful", you must add "in context Y". Someone for example, who says, they have no need of optional type checking, has never worked on a project like Gmail that has dozens of engineers and a million lines of code. Tools like Closure Compiler weren't made up because the JS programmers on the project love type checking, the introduction of a compiler obviously slows down workflow, they evolved over time as a necessity. But Closure Compiler is completely unnecessary if you are a single engineer working on a small project that maybe has a thousand lines of progressively enhanced JS. There is no ideal language for all scenarios. The article fails to focus on the real issues and pain points of web development which really have nothing to do with the language use, and that is the pitfalls of the layout and rendering engine. Frankly, the language issues are a distraction to the real issues facing Web development today. And just to comment on the GWT/Dart article, since I actually work on GWT, the idea of a 'major player' in Web development is fraught with bias. Again, context is important. As of last count, we have 130,000 monthly active GWT developers that we can count (there may be uncounted users of the SDK who get the libs through Maven central. I just keynoted the GWT.create conference recently, that was standing room only, major Banks, Financial Institutions, Health insurance companies, Nike, Amazon, even Apple iAds, use GWT internally for Web development. The intense competition in the Web market means it is deeply fragmented with many solutions, and there will never be a winner-takes-all major player in either frameworks, or languages. Just like it never happened with Web 1.0 frameworks with Java. We had JSP/JSF, Wicket, Tapestry, Play, RIFE, the list of frameworks is just too long to name. We live in a polyglot world and people should stop obsessing over whether their favorite language or framework "wins". Just get your work done and be happy. |
We are building a web app platform for the jvm called HiveMind (crudzilla.com) and a major design choice we've made is to be very focused on web development. No single platform,framework,IDE need to magically be great for all problems.