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Discussion on: Javascript needs competition on the front end. Thoughts?

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Josh Cheek

IMO, that's an argument in favour of the OP's point. In your mind, JS evolving is a good thing, so we don't need a language to compete with it. But there is another perspective that its evolution is a bad thing and we need an alternative that is small and stable. So, depending on what you prioritize, the JS changes are positive, or they are negative. Hence, it makes sense to decouple the browser from the language and treat it like a platform (ie if it was a VM, then you could tell it where to find the bytecode for your interpreter, and then you could ship code to it in any version of any interpreted language that you wanted -- or compile your language to its bytecode). Then old websites don't break, b/c they can link to the version of JS they were implemented against (exempting changes in the platform itself), and you don't have to wait for browser adoption to ship features, b/c nearly all features are built on the platform, not provided by the platform natively, so you can implement new features and ship them to the browser without depending on the browsers to implement them, and to implement them consistently.