JavaScript is BASIC today! (In a good way.)

Every day the awareness that JavaScript tends to play the same role (to occupy the same niche) that was typical of BASIC about thirty or even fifteen years ago is growing in me.

In other words, JavaScript is becoming a simple and widespread language, far outgrowing its original purpose, and now almost any application can be composed on it (both client, server, and console ... and even with the GUI, as I recently saw ).

Whole operating systems (Firefox OS, Google Chrome OS, Open webOS) are created, for which JavaScript is not less “native” than C for UNIX at one time.
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JavaScript languages ​​appear (you can recall CoffeeScript, Dart, newborn TypeScript , and so on).

Noticing this, it is appropriate to immediately rejoice at the fact that they are making at least less serious complaints to the javascript that they did not have once to BASIC, who were justly disliked for his GOTO and the encouragement of the macaroni code. Moreover, javascript is much better transferred from platform to platform and from browser to browser.

In addition, many existing javascript problems are not particularly significant because they are eliminated by widespread open source tools. So, the lack of rigor of the syntax is eliminated by strict verification of the source code ( JSLint , for example). The lack of data processing facilities (arrays, objects) and functions is eliminated by connecting Underscore , and Underscore.string helps strings, and dates - moment.js , for example, helps . The complexity of using the DOM methods (in which, however, it is not the JavaScript language that is to blame, but the browsers and their differences) is overcome by jQuery . And so on. This is a habit of programmers.

So with javascript we were lucky. I love this language, and I wish him continued prosperity.