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     shipping binary code to browsers

He's not talking about binary code. He's talking about bytecode with the same security restrictions Javascript has, with the only difference being that a bytecode language is optimized for being a target of compilers, otherwise you have to be Google to make a functional compiler targeting Javascript.

     Flash is bad enough

He's not talking about Java Applets or Flash either, he's talking about shipping a bytecode interpreter/compiler instead of a Javascript interpreter/compiler.

     if you want to be a good programmer then you need to learn other 
     languages

I'm increasingly frustrated by having to learn programming languages, not for productivity, not because I'm learning useful new things, but because a certain platform requires it.

     Eric Raymonds famous article actually recommends you should try and 
     learn a new language every year

I would take Eric's advice with a grain of salt: far more useful is to learn new algorithms, data structures, some design skills or do some math learning / exercises every year. Or how about sharping those marketing skills by reading some books / travelling / investing in some offshore relationships?

Learning a language that's similar to what you already know is a waist of time. And if you properly learn C++, Haskell and Lisp you're pretty much done with everything there is to know about programming languages.

     Javascript is actually a real cool language masquerading as a very dull 
     mainstream one

IMHO, programming languages cannot be separated from their mainstream implementation, as many people seem to suggest. No matter how cool Javascript is, you're going to feel the pain related to browser issues.

     If all you have is a hammer then every thing looks like a nail

Except that most programming languages are hammers of various sizes with a steeper learning curve than a library that could give you the same productivity.

Case in point for Java programmers: http://www.playframework.org/

I'm afraid all this seems like pedantic nit-picking to me - attacking the letter of what I said rather than what I was trying to say.

However I did want to comment on my favourite line in this: " if you properly learn C++, Haskell and Lisp "

Yes. If you properly learn them I would fully agree.

I have in my time made my living as both a C++ programmer and a Lisp programmer and was pretty good at both - but not even close to having properly learned either.

Learning them properly would be a life times experience and I suspect you would be a pretty decent programmer at the end of it.

That's because you've got innacurate claims, especially regarding to binaries / Flash.

To some extent, people can have this right now. Here's what you can do with Silverlight + the Gestalt script (yay, Python): http://ironpython.net/browser/gettingstarted.html

And lets be clear: we are talking about IronPython working and manipulating the browser's DOM here, not the in-a-box model of Flash.

Unfortunately, problems with Silverlight: proprietary, not cross-platform enough, not popular enough, Gestalt is loading slowly because it has to download stuff, the IronPython interpreter not fast enough.

Some of these are solvable, but if it isn't a standard implemented by everybody, then it's useless.

I think this is an important question to ask. I don't think the OP is asking it for quite the right reasons, but I still think it's important.

As web developers, we're all about 'openness', 'choice' and other warm fuzzy concepts. So why is it OK that JavaScript is the only client side option?

the script element has 'language' and 'type' attributes, clearly indicating the possibility of other types of script (indeed, microsoft used to support VBScript in web pages, don't know if they still do).

To address some of your points:

1) Implementation isn't important. Sure, don't ship binaries to browsers. That's just a detail, the main point is why can't we ship anything other than JS?

3) JS is a cool language. So what? JPG is a cool format, doesn't mean there's no room for PNG too.

4) If all you have is JavaScript then everything looks like a JS problem.

>First of all - shipping binary code to browsers. Please. No. Flash is bad enough. Say good bye to all the grease monkey style hacks and remixes and lots of other interesting things about the web.

Monkey patching bytecode may very well be harder but is that really used? Greasemonkey is marginal at best. What other things do you have in mind?

>Secondly - either you are a programmer or not. I can't actually tell from your article if you want to be or not. However if you want to be a good programmer then you need to learn other languages - you might not be an expert in those other languages but being able to navigate your way round them - it is good for your programmers brain.

I've learned plenty of languages and do appreciate some of the points of Javascript. I just don't see why everyone seems to defend it as the one-true-language for the client side. For everything else people make plenty of diverse choices yet somehow on the one platform that for historical reasons is stuck with a single language saying you'd rather use another implies somehow that you don't get it.

>And thirdly - Javascript is actually a real cool language masquerading as a very dull mainstream one. I resisted doing too much in it for years but as I needed to do more and more I found out that its very powerful and flexible. Also if you use something like jquery you get a lot of Ruby style bits and pieces.

I am using jQuery and it does have some goodies. The point isn't that with effort I couldn't make myself more comfortable with it. The point is that I don't see much that Javascript gives me that Ruby doesn't. So the fact I am forced to use Javascript is a net-negative for me.

>If all you have is a hammer then every thing looks like a nail. Ruby might be a pretty good language - but there is a reason there are so many other languages and its not because all the other people are idiots who weren't smart enough to come up with Ruby.

Certainly. And I do use other languages. The reason I'd like to be able to use Ruby for both codebases is that that would allow me to do interesting stuff I can't right now.

In fact the same criticism can be made of Javascript, that because it's the only hammer available everything looks like a nail. I'm proposing more languages, not less.

That most of the web (and obviously Flash is the exception to this) is text based is not an accident. Browsers and people are not the only thing reading the web - there are crawlers and other tools doing this, that and the other. Search engine crawlers for example go into the javascript and extract links.

Also I really don't think you have thought it through as a developer - its bad enough debugging stuff in browser without it being compiled and only having basically machine code to look at.

I don't think its the one true language for anyone to be honest - but expecting the browser to ship with several languages in it doesn't appeal to anyone either (and I know you just want a few byte code runtimes in but I cannot see how that would work while still maintaining all the richness and complexity of the web as it stands)

anyway - I think if there was any appetite to do anything about this problem it would have been done by now. There were people grumbling about it 10 years ago and I've seen a number of projects to add languages come and go.

> That most of the web (and obviously Flash is the exception to this) is text based is not an accident. Browsers and people are not the only thing reading the web - there are crawlers and other tools doing this, that and the other. Search engine crawlers for example go into the javascript and extract links.

I can see how that is important for the strings in the code but I'm not aware of many use cases for crawling the actual javascript code.

>Also I really don't think you have thought it through as a developer - its bad enough debugging stuff in browser without it being compiled and only having basically machine code to look at.

If I want to debug javascript I need Firebug or Chrome's tools and those can very well have support for a standard debugger.

>but expecting the browser to ship with several languages in it doesn't appeal to anyone either (and I know you just want a few byte code runtimes

I just want one standard bytecode runtime. I can ship and have the user cache whatever runtime I need.

> but I cannot see how that would work while still maintaining all the richness and complexity of the web as it stands)

I still don't see what web richness is there to be had inside the <script> tag. Seems to me all the uses of it that aren't simply execution are marginal at best.

>anyway - I think if there was any appetite to do anything about this problem it would have been done by now. There were people grumbling about it 10 years ago and I've seen a number of projects to add languages come and go.

It seems to have been enough of a problem for google to have built GWT. I wonder why they haven't shipped a Dalvik VM in Chrome and have their GWT apps target the VM on Android and Chrome and Javascript for everyone else. Is V8 execution these days comparable to a good JVM/CLR?

I suspect this is becoming a bit fruitless because it seems like your tack is - "I can't imagine anything other than the way I want to use the web"

But let me just mention one other view:

The browser, despite the inconsistencies between different brands, is very accessible. Anyone with the ability to peck away at a keyboard and read some basic instructions can make a web page - and with only a little more effort add some quite rich functionality even if only by cutting and pasting some javascript.

Now imagine if instead you needed a compiler and an SDK (see footnote), if you couldn't just shove a bit of code in the page but instead it needed to be compiled and included separately.

Would the web be what it is today?

Look at Java and Flash - why aren't they the dominant forces on the web because they are taking very much the approach you advocate.

footnote: and who would make these? Would you have one for every browser, for every language. Who would maintain them? In fact the more thought I give to it the more impressed I am that there is anything like one single common language available in all browsers

The problem with more languages is that you fragment the community. Maybe it'd indeed be nice to use Ruby instead of Javascript for a project or two. But I don't think something like jQuery would be simple to port over and maintain (especially considering that the mobile landscape is even more nightmarish than desktop cross browser support). And what about plugins?

And what happens when you get the odd client that wants you to do some work for them and it so happens they are using I don't know, PHP or Java on the client-side? (or CL or Scheme, if that's your cup of coffee)

Should we standardize on a single language for the server-side as well?

The server-side is a good example of the fragmentation I mentioned. There are classes of projects that are hopelessly redundant (e.g. minimalist MVC frameworks), and classes of projects that only exist/work in some languages for various reasons (e.g. async MySQL APIs).

In an ideal world, I'd prefer if there weren't so many languages that do essentially the same thing with different syntaxes, but then again, standardization in itself is its own little can of worms (the short story being that it involves a lot of politics).

"First of all - shipping binary code to browsers. Please. No. Flash is bad enough. Say good bye to all the grease monkey style hacks and remixes and lots of other interesting things about the web"

I don't see how browsers interpreting compiled bytecode would prevent greasemonkey-style hacks.