JavaScript is the new Perl
I don’t think we will see a “winner” of the browser-language wars any time soon, but there will be a winner. JavaScript hype is still through the roof, and with the discovery of a dynamic language in the browser actually works decently between late browsers, people are thoroughly excited; however, I’d akin this to people discovering Perl during the advent of C and C++. Does it work? Yes. Is it pretty? Not by a long shot.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Perl – I think it’s an incredibly powerful and fun language that now suffers from the bad reputation it acquired before gaining true object-oriented features – but, those who hate Perl hate it because it’s “too hard to maintain” and too “strange.” So if you want to talk about a strange language, look at JavaScript – it’s like Perl times ten. At least Perl has a consistent type inferencing and enforceable namespacing! (I think you’d have a hard time arguing that enforceable namespacing is a bad thing… global variable collisions can result in some pretty nasty bugs, particularly because it is easy to never see the downstream impact.)
