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Does the Future Belong to Javascript?

June 13th, 2007

I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that Javascript has a good chance of displacing Perl, Python, Ruby, and other scripting languages over the next two or three years: it has all their advantages, plus developers have to learn it to write modern applications.  Apple’s announcement that third-party development for the iPhone will be Web 2.0-ish — i.e., HTML and Javascript on the client side — is just another nudge in this direction.  Kids, if you want to be on the leading edge in 2010, there are worse bets to make than becoming a Javascript guru now.

Extensible Programming

  1. Blake Winton
    June 13th, 2007 at 14:40 | #1
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    So when are you going to start re-writing DrProject in Javascript?

    Seriously, my comment here grew too long, so I’ve put it up on my weblog.

  2. Christopher
    June 15th, 2007 at 00:46 | #2
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    Sure I think learning javascript will be helpful to you, if you want to become a web-monkey – it doesn’t hurt to know it for fun either. However I don’t think it will replace something like python, perl, etc. I know the web programming crowd got excited when his Steveness said that the development for 3rd parties would be web programs. However deep down inside even apple doesn’t believe this, and knows that this is a joke.

    Case in point:

    May31 -
    Steve Jobs: I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

    And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

    June 11 -
    I do have one last thing.…What about developers? [applause]…We’ve come up with a very sweet solution.…We’ve got an innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices. Really innovative.…The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. It gives us tremendous capability.…You can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.

    source: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2007/06/13/a-very-sweet-solution/

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