January 4th, 2013 by 
Lincoln Baxter III 
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.)
Point being? As someone who has already gone through several language hypes and paradigm shifts in Computer Science (even in my relatively short 14 year experience,) JavaScript is a lot like Perl – extremely powerful, but a potential maintenance nightmare if one is not extremely diligent – and while I do like both languages, JavaScript just waiting for the next technology to come around and make it look like Perl does today: pervasive, but lacking enterprise adoption on large applications.
