22
May
JavaScript Won By Default
Love it or hate it – JavaScript is here to stay. JavaFX, Flash, Flex, Silverlight, Apollo – they’re all fun but JavaScript is what we have today and for a long time to come.
Jeff Atwood’s blog “Coding Horror” sums up the history and the state of JavaScript excellently in his Lingua Franca Of The Web post.
However this quote was such a gem I just had to repeat it:
[JavaScript won] by default. People wanted to build better web applications. Programming against Flash movies sucked. JavaScript was already in all the browsers. If you’re the last man left on earth, it doesn’t matter how ugly you are when the women come to re-populate the planet.
Oh what a metaphor!
Flex’s main development language is ECMAScript which is basically the “standardized” version of JavaScript. So it only adds to JavaScript’s dominance. Since Mozilla Tamarin is the Flex JIT for ECMAScript, I think it really just deserves to be lumped in as “JavaScript” — albiet the ECMAScript name is much better since JavaScript has nothing to do with Java…even though ECMAScript sounds like some kind of throw up.