Why We Should Stop Using JavaScript According to Douglas Crockford (Inventor of JSON)

I will keep using Javascript as long it pays my bills

The point I take away from this that I don't see many other people commenting on is that while Douglas is specifically talking about JavaScript, I see this as a metaphor/opinion that can be applied to the entire development industry. Companies advertise and hire for technologies because the technology has market share, not because it fits into their application stack.

"We're just stuck with this crap, and they keep piling on new features on everything and the new features always create new problems, and it doesn't have to be like that." This guy definitely is aware. This is the current state of software development in a nutshell. It's a nightmare.

“There are still people developing languages but nobody cares. One person can make a programming language, a really good one, but you can’t get adoption for it.” He made a good point and he is absolutely right.

He also wrote "JavaScript: The Good Parts", the most popular javascript book. I agree with him 100% about the state of javascript/typescript.

I think it’s because when all these new languages were coming out in the 90’s, companies were just still starting to integrate computers and the internet to their business, so they had the flexibility to move to new and better languages when a better one came out. But now, many companies entire digital foundation is built off of one tech stack for 10+ years, and these are massive companies. Imagine all the work of re-training their employees to this new stack, converting their whole code base to this new language. There’s a plethora of things that could go wrong. That’s why it’s hard for PHP to die. It’s hard to blame them really

I've been saying this for years about the web languages in general. HTML and CSS are languages that, though they've been modified to support applications, were designed to describe documents. The application tags and styles were added in with mixed results, but HTML and CSS are STILL languages for describing documents. And JavaScript was invented to support that model. We can obviously create large and complex applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I'm a professional full-stack engineer, and do this every day. But it WOULD be nice to have modern languages that the browsers understand natively, without transpilers, that were designed from ground up to be for creating applications, not documents with application code thrown on top.

I totally understand his sentiment. If we were to gather the best stakeholders in the language/browser space, lock 'em in a room with the brief to create the next gen of DOM and a scripting language to manipulate it, I'm 100% certain that the result would solve all of the DOM and Javascript's shortcomings, be more capable, be faster, more robust and usable. It makes me wonder why there isn't already such a project.

JSON not allowing a trailing comma was the biggest mistake.

Well I've been doing web development for a while now and one thing that I came to understand is that there is no perfect technology, there are instead "tradeoffs"

1:15 "There are terrible mistakes in the way the web works , in the way our operating systems work..." As a graybeard whose favorite language is COBOL, I agree with him 100%. It sounds stupid, but I absolutely guarantee the internet was not supposed to end up the way it has. It is just what happens when folks focus on short term profit and clicks (attention) instead of actually doing something productive long term.

I took my first JavaScript course in 2000. The teacher said he could see the day when JavaScript would become a dead language. Now, it is more entrenched in web development than ever, and it doesn't look like it's going away any time soon.

as a web developer, the only concern for us back then when it comes to javascript was browser compatibility, which jQuery has solved, now all these new frameworks etc. instead of making it simple, it just getting way way more complicated.

I absolutely love JavaScript, and I agree with everything Crockford says in this short video. It seems that a lot of the commenters here think that the problems with JavaScript can be solved by taking features AWAY from it, and let it resemble older languages like C more. But he clearly states that we need a new generation of programming languages - he talks about how development of new languages kind of stopped with Java and JavaScript. He doesn't mention C#, PHP, Python, Ruby etc. but they are all from about 25 years ago, and it does indeed seem that we are stuck - and that is a bad thing! The problem isn't whether you have one, two, or three equalsigns, or whether you need to define your datatypes yourself or let the compiler figure it out - the problem is that our entire model of what programming should be, is still stuck in the 1990s ...

This man is golden, selfless, humble enough to tell you to look beyong them. I have always had the dream to be mentored by people like this. Sir, your words are golden and perfect for the next generation to learn from.

It all boils down to financial incentive. As long as executives can get working apps at a low enough development and production cost, then it doesn't matter to them that much. People create great languages but in the beginning, it is pointless for developers to learn as there are no job opportunities and very few ressources to learn from and get solutions to eventual issues. As for companies, they won't add it to their stack because of the hardship of getting developers that are proficient in that new language and it creates a vicious circle that keeps that language into oblivion. Unless there is backing from a popular company or you get enough developers really excited about it, it won't take off. JavaScript is now ubiquitous and with such a huge ecosystem, people will need a really strong reason to move away from it.

It didn't stop. TypeScript, Rust, Kotlin, Swift, etc. Most devs don't touch the smelly parts of JS anymore. They use TS (+transpiler/bundler). But it's not about the language, it's about the browser embedding support and they aren't doing that. Edit: Yes WASM, but see my reply (TLDR: it needs tighter integration with control over DOM etc. not interfacing with JS)

Doug was there when E (the language which inspired JavaScript's promise implementation) was created, and honestly, the web should steal the rest of E - especially the capability model that enables secure interaction with the UI. The existing DOM is broken beyond repair: if you grant any component the ability to render nodes, you also grant the ability to load JavaScript with the global window in scope, and it inherits the ambient authority that comes from the SOP.

I wouldve loved if he actually mentioned specifics such as as drawbacks of JavaScript and what makes it smelly and what he would expect from its replacement or his imagination of what the new evolution of web could be if JavaScript was to be dumped? His reasoning is totally understandable but vague and can be applied on a lot of things at least based on this video or snippet if its a part of a larger one!

Finally, an authorative professional who say an obvious thing: javascript is *unamendable*. It cannot be fixed. It must be replaced.