Reading Jon Udell’s excellent post on languages and libraries, I wonder how we ended up with widespread support for a standardized programming language in the browser that (almost) nobody is using on the server side? I never really invested time in really learning it, but the little I know about it doesn’t suggest any reason why it should not be comparable to Ruby or Python. It’s highly dynamic, it runs on the JVM and the .NET platform, it’s got extremely cool support for XML programming … what am I missing?
Update: Fascinating follow-up from IONA’s Steve Vinoski:
Open source middleware projects like Celtix and Tuscany are getting Javascript support. Adding such support to Celtix is what I’m personally working on at the moment, in fact.
Type “JavaScript sucks” into Google, and you’ll get some reasons why it’s not popular.