Steve Yegge is famous for talking about Javascript as the Next Big Language.
I believe he was talking about Javascript 2/ECMA Script 4, which is currently in a "holding pattern". I personally believe this is great for the browser implementers and the web, but terrible for javascript growing into a language suitable for programming in the large (which is what I was hoping for some time this year).
Joel S mentioned once that he views C++ as a failure/disappointment (of course being a failure doesn't stop him and millions of others from using it) because it failued to have a String "type". In his words: "String is too important to be left to library implementers".
I would like to generalise this concept: while many popular languages can quite happily be "extended" by libraries, this doesn't mean that the language designers should leave out important features and leave it up to library writers to provide implementations just becuase they can (as it almost always turns into a zoo in about 30 seconds).
Some features are just too important to be left to library writers ;)
About Me
- Michael Neale
- Michael lives and works in the Blue Mountains, Australia (just outside of Sydney). 2 kids and a poodle. He retired from Red Hat, worked on Drools and deltacloud and other bits, now working on a startup (CloudBees) when he isn't updating his profile, and various open source things.
Some interesting things I once read