Best thing we can do to JavaScript is retire it: JSON creator Douglas Crockford

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JavaScript is the world’s most popular programming language according to most surveys. It is used by over 65% of developers, way ahead of Python at 48% (ignoring HTML, CSS and SQL which are not general purpose languages) It is an unlikely achievement considering its origins.

'The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it,' says JSON creator Douglas Crockford • DEVCLASS

TS is good enough. Even if we replace JS with something else, the tooling would be just as bloated with all those SSR, splitting, chunking, asset import pipelines required to reduce load/TTI times in an ecosystem of this scale and with all the use cases JS sees. As for language bloat, I’m not aware of any mainstream language that didn’t bloat over time. And considering that JS has to be backwards compatible it’s insane that things are still reasonable. And what language features since ES5 are this bloat? Block-scope variables? Async-await? Exponentiation operator? Destructuring? Proxies? Crockford must be getting old…

“first, we don’t have a language. Second, we don’t have support in browsers for the language we don’t have, and are not likely to get.”
Crockford is entitled to his opinion, and it does carry significant weight. But this particular opinion feels an awful lot to me like the Elon Musk SNL snafu. I don’t see JS going away, or even being replaced by, for example, TS. I see things like TS becoming supported in the browser, which might be a quantum leap forward.
The issue isn’t, to my mind, with the language. The issue is with folks who might benefit from a deeper learning and understanding of it.

Makes a lot of sense actually.
The language is growing and bloating, and I can see the need for a fresh start from zero.
That won’t mean JS will go away anytime soon, but totally get how this is actually procrastinating technical evolution that can really make an impact.
Anything on top of JS doesn’t actually change how it works under the hood, which is likely the biggest pitfal.

Very interesting perspective on JavaScript

It doesn’t make sense, if JS can be retired, then why choose another OOP language like E? why can’t it be a FP language like purescript? Is TS perfect? how much syntax noise is in it or any OOP strongly typed language nowadays? would you still like such a language after learning FP?
Well, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that if there is a new language that can replace JS, it will be shorter to write.
Laziness is the greatest motivation for progress.
well, my paragraph is also bullshit