Accept javascript as the one-and-only language of the future?
Update: comments work again. Thanks to Aaron for reporting the problem.
The major problem with the web/html as an application platform is the lack of choice when it comes to programming/scripting languages on the client side. The de facto (and to some extent de jure) language on the client side is (as we all know) javascript.
A lot of code execution needs to be done on the client side to have acceptable performance (no one would render 3D-games on the server side and then transport them to the client). Much other code execution is preferably done on the client side as well - any type of signal processing - like audio, image and video processing. These applications would put a lot of load on the servers. Why concentrate computing power instead of letting it stay (in a way) distributed?
I'm not saying that javascript cannot do these things - because obviously it can. I'm just saying that a whole lot of other languages are used by programmers today and are preferred for different reasons.
IMO, instead of javascript, a language independent runtime (or VM) should be shipped with the browsers. This runtime shouldn't even assume that the languages are dynamic (python and javascript doesn't differ that much, other than syntax). This way programmers can use whatever language they prefer and compile the code into bytecode that can be executed by this runtime.
The sad thing about this is that code will no longer be open by default but instead compiled. I learned all javascript, css and html I know today by reading other's page sources. In the world I'm describing the programmers of the future won't have that possibility.
Note that greasemonkey and similar browser plug-ins would still be possible, albeit a bit harder to write if you don't have access to the code of the application you are modifying. Although, with sensible object introspection (aka reflection) in the runtime that shouldn't be too bad either.
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© 2008 Markus Johnsson