Jeremy Miller talks a bit here on JavaScript as an pretty decent programming language and about doing "metaprogramming" with it. What really caught my eye, though, was Jeremy's comment that "JavaScript, even more so than VB, has to be the Rodney Dangerfield of programming languages".

See, I actually hate writing JavaScript code. The reasons, however, have nothing to do with it being dynamically typed (I actually like that part). Heck, I'll go as far as to say that it has some pretty nifty features and it's actually a pretty decent language (and let's not forget it was one of the original languages shipping with the .NET runtime in the form of JScript.NET).

My reasons for disliking JavaScript have little to do with the language itself, but with the platform on which it is most commonly used. Let's not kid ourselves: The Web Browser is a piss-poor platform to do development on, simply because it was not meant to be a development platform in the first place for this kind of thing. How many man/years have been spent debugging JavaScript code using stupid alert()'s in the past ten years just because the the browser just was not up to the part?

Sure, a few years back Microsoft had the Script Debugger, but I could never get that thing to work right, and it was actually more painful to use than the alert() statements. Fortunately, we now have FireBug and Firefox, which help tremendously.

And, by the way, I'll do JavaScript any day over VBScript, thank you very much. (And in fact, I did so for a quite a while doing deployment scripts for the Windows Scripting Host to deploy Sharepoint applications 5 or 6 years ago!).

JavaScript, Web Browsers