JavaScript shogun deflects Google's mid-air Dart attack

Shades of VBScript

Microsoft used to be at the receiving end of a good kicking for pulling this crap with Internet Explorer. They'd shove in extensions into HTML and CSS as well as new tech VBScript, ActiveX, VML etc. in order to pollute the web and tie it to their own browser.

And now we see Google doing the same with the likes of Dart, PNacl, WebM and so on. They should be receiving an equally large kicking for what they are up to.

The excuse that some of the tech is open source doesn't really cut it either since it will still result in Chrome being the reference implementation and other browsers playing continual catchup. There are perfectly good standards bodies that Google can submit to if they want to see their tech adopted without shoving out some half baked standard and expecting others to jump when they say so.

Reinventing the wheel

Why is JavaScript being hacked and cajoled into all these contortions, when there are perfectly good languages out there such as Java or C# which support "sandboxes and module loaders, array comprehensions, binary data objects, built-in hash maps and sets, and super-method calls, block scoping, array comprehension, maps and proxy"? Wouldn't it be easier to just take an existing language and plug in the DOM-related functions?

In order to continue to be effective in my job as a code monkey, I constantly need to learn new things. That could either be enhancing my understanding of the technologies I already use or learning new technologies. Which ever it is, I'm always reading a book or a web site just to keep up.

I try to avoid getting bogged down learning dead end stuff which will probably mean that I am not learning something I really should be learning. Dead ends are unlikely to reward me for the effort and will probably result in my re-writing a substantial amount of code.

My present major concern is the Windows desktop platform. Will it survive this decade in a recognisable form? I have a lot of coding invested in that platform. I'm hearing noises about platforms supporting applications in JavaScript so maybe I am sitting pretty with my existing skill base. Maybe I need to put some real effort into learning Java despite of the fact that I have seen that it isn't nearly as platform neutral as originally intended by Sun. What about Dart?

If OS vendors are turning to JavaScript, will Dart ever do that? Right now I would not learn Dart. But I never rule such things out. Ultimately, the reason that I am skilled in JavaScript now is its universal and reasonably uniform browser support. And provided you avoid using the crap features, its a reasonable language to work in.

The real problem in web development is the awful DOM API. If "JavaScript Harmony" helps there, I will most definitely be learning more.

Will DART be any more successful than Go?

Google seem to be a bit schizo. As well as Dart, they have GWT (Google Web Toolkit), which also offers an alternative to the pains of JavaScript coding. GWT does this by enabling developers to code in a statically typed programming language with good tooling - Java - and to then compile down to JavaScript, HTML and CSS for deployment. Treating JavaScript as an execution only language means all the work that's gone into optimising the JS engines in various browsers can be exploited, while the programmer can rely on the IDE and compile time support for Java that catches many of the most frustrating errors that crop up at run time in a loosely typed language like JavaScript.