the Onda

Dave Thomas, the technical world's version of Mark Twain, has a nice short article "Programming the World in a Browser Real Men Don't Do JavaScript Do They?!," which covers how Javascript is coming out on top of the dynamic language pile and will probably be one of the most popular computer languages in use going forward. It's funny to see the parallels between it and C: how they were both languages created to solve a specific problem (script the browser for JS, write UNIX in C's case) that exploded as their underlying hosts became more pervasive. The lesson seems to be: if you want to write a long-lasting meaningful computer language, get out of the ivory tower of ideal types and find a host that is just going to take off— in fact, the model could be called "Languages as remoras."

In my new job as member of the CTO's office at HP, I am supposed to have opinions on all sorts of "where is this going?" questions, at least from a technology perspective. One popular topic these days is browser-based runtimes for building the next generation of applications or: who will win the death march between Flash/Flex, Silverlight, Java, and DOM scripting with Javascript?

I should note here that I am pretty awful at doing this part of my job because I find it hard to get to an answer I believe from abstract principles— that is, if I haven't worked myself in the specific platforms, it's hard for me to get to a credible opinion on who is likely to win the hearts and minds of the next wave of developers.

But despite who wins the runtime, it is worth noting that Javascript (or its "Kentucky-cousins" ECMAScript, Actionscript, and even VBScript) all underlie most of the solutions out there as glue language at minimum, and the core language in some. So in some way, shape, or form, Javascript is here to stay.

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