I like the Tomas Fuchs paraphrase of Bruce Sterling: "JavaScript is the duct tape of the internet". With CommonJS and the growth of server side JavaScript, it will be much more.
It's a language that quietly accepts laziness and ignorance, saving up the pain so that it can all rain down on you at some unforeseeable moment in the future. It's a language that rewards discipline: I recommend developing discipline.
JavaScript has become my language of choice, for all it's imperfections, because:
- It's the only language that's available on all the platforms I want to target: major mobile phones and desktops.
- It's remarkably simple, scheme in C-drag, so I focus on getting things done rather than fooling around with the language and tools.
- I like the forward facing side of development, it's a language that's frequently used to tune the user experience and that plays to my motivations.
Of course there are essential tools, work flows that need to be optimised, and developers skills that haven't been widely applied to JavaScript that should be:
- Editors and IDEs; test frameworks facilitating the writing of tests and the execution of tests; debuggers and profilers; libraries and toolkits; command line JavaScript implementations.
- Isolation of dependencies: the chief dependency is with the DOM, the second is with DOM wrapping libraries, the third is with widget libraries, all of which should be wrapped so that you're working with logical elements rather than (other people's) stuff on your page.
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