If there are easier solutions, then great! But if not, then we have to have something. Javascript as it stands now really does not allow for libraries or mash-ups in a safe way.

I also completely reject the supposition my Microsoft that people who want to do complicated things not do them in Javascript. The reality is that people are going to push the envelope on the client side using Javascript.

The language MUST grow and improve to meet these new demands.

I think it is a non-starter to create an entirely new language to meet these new demands. First off, what the heck does that mean? Javascript 4 is an incremental solution with specific, concrete features that can be added to the language. Talk about a new language is so unrelated as to make no sense at all.

Keep in mind that Java is already in the browsers and BASIC was put in IE. But the real action is in javascript. Given that track record, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to make a sequel to Javascript, rather than anything else.

Which many people (and I do work a lot with Java) would understand like “worse but better”.

Javascript is a toy only in a certain sense. For example, there is no formal notion of a Javscript library that you can include. Using prototype inheritance is more verbose when it comes to typing it up than it has to be. There is no standard way to walk the prototype chain (pls correct me if I am wrong). Many people will say that static typing is needed for big apps (I am not 100% sold on that idea myself, but I’m throwing it in here anyway). There is no standard Javascript library.

So, it’s a toy in a sense that it lacks things we take for granted when we use “normal” non-extension languages (like packages and standard libraries).

You’re right that people have coded great things in Javascript. In that sense it’s definitely not a toy. But in that sense even toy toys are not toys, because they help kids learn how to think, and these kids later grow up to be engineers and so on. So even regular toys are serious business, and serious business is ultimately a toy. Everything depends on perspective.

@Leo: “S4 brings Javascript from a toy extension language to a serious, premiere development platform. Bravo!”

JavaScript has never been a toy language; just because it makes it really easy to do basic tasks does not make it a toy. Elegance with simplicity does not make it a toy. I’m personally watching people take this “toy” and do things with it on the order of great, flexible languages like LISP and Haskell while at the same time using it to emulate features that many from compiled worlds have come to rely on. How many languages can pull the type of chaining that jQuery and Prototype has? What about emulating namespaces and thereby isolating, on the fly, someone’s large code base from everyone else’s? What about the possibilities that JS closures offer? What about the ability to use boolean operators to define defaults? Object mutability? I can keep going…

You can point at various languages for each of these features, but how many bring them all together in a way that makes it easy for any motivated individual to understand and use quickly?

Calling it just a “toy” contributes to the vast misunderstanding that many have about the language. There are things that I can pull in JavaScript (and have) that would be a major PITA to pull in most other languages, and many of the features that it has (Function as data, anyone) are being added to the more strict compiled languages, simply because the people who create those languages recognize the power–not the simplicity but the power–that JS has.

Take a closer look. The more you dive into it, the more you come to understand how elegant the pure simplicity of the language structure is, and how liberating it can be.

In fact, I doubt many will. From my perspective, I can’t wait for the bug fixes and syntactic enhancements that will make my life easier: control over enumerability, iterator/generators, operator overloading, and so on.

The type annotations confuse the hell out of me, but they’re optional, so I won’t mess with them unless I need to compile to bytecode for, say, a mobile phone environment.