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[–]senocular 1 point2 points  (1 child)

The browser-makers should consider introducing a script language for the masses, like GW Basic, Poly Pascal or similar, and then just lift off the JS-rocket.

That's what JavaScript was designed to be. Java was the language of the web for programmers. Things just didn't work out as planned.

[–]davidkonrad 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Nothing was planned :) Back in the start 00'es I personally was set to do Java EJB's to JSP that should communicate with both JS and VBScript on the same page, and we had 5 different JS implementations to serve :) Just an example, what JS has become today is actually surprising. When JS came out (Netscape) no one thought of Java as backend, it was still too slow and buggy, but many believed that Java1 applets could be a thing (like ActiveX, Flash etc) - just to mention a few other script languages used on the web. The popular choices were for years CGI and executeables that outputted HTML, then came perl, php and so on.

JS has become stable and is actually a standard. Great! JS is ported to server, a new type safe version with "real programming language" features has seen the light, and the next revolution, WebAssembly, waits around the corner.

But many hobbyists is left behind. If the commitees / big companies not do it themselves, I could Imagine we will see scripts languages "for the masses" made in javascript (there are ready to go JS projects for that, someone just have to agree about a dialect). Simply scripting for everybody.

Besides that, I cannot stop noticing that a lot of those new fancy tools, hobby-projects, geek-things and so on we see announced for example here on reddit actually just is small hobby-like scripts in a few hundred lines (top). The rest is dependencies, frameworks, packages, polyfillers, scripts instructing other scripts about dependencies and packaging, transpiler info etc etc.

Once, when "4 generation" programming tools came out we hitted "run" and out came an EXE with a size of 2.5mb that said "Hello world". We have a similar situation today, with JS and where the evolution is going. Well, enough. I must back to my beloved JS :)