As far back as six years ago, Scott Hanselman, vice president of developer community at Microsoft, was saying “JavaScript is not the language we deserve but it is the language we have.” Hanselman told LeadDev that it’s an assessment he stands by today.
The most recent Stack Overflow survey suggests that while 62% of devs use JavaScript, just 58% say they admire it, compared to 82% of Rust users, or 68% with Python.
Now there are efforts to change the narrative. During a meeting of the committee that oversees JavaScript’s specification globally, a group led by Google staff software engineer Shu-yu Guo proposed splitting JavaScript in two, supported by developers from Mozilla, Apple, Moddable, and Sony.
The core version, which the proposal calls JSO, would be implemented by runtime engines, while another variant – called JSSugar – would include more features that require third-party compiling tools to run.
The principle is to try and leave the core JavaScript (or JSO) alone in an effort to reduce complexity and lower the risk of something going wrong. This way, more experimental feature development can happen through tooling and not the core. “Complexity belongs at the edges. Foundational tech ought to be simple,” as the presentation put it.