JavaScript : Always the bride's maid, and never the bride

I've been working with JavaScript since 1998, when I first started 'developing' for the web (if you can call hand coding HTML pages developing...).

Back when the DOM was non-standard, and most of what we now call Ajax and Web 2.0 was known by a far less sexy moniker, namely DHTML (huh?)

CIO Magazine looked at JavaScript recently, and it got me to thinking about the little language that clearly WASN'T.

JS is great, JS breaks, JS is hard to debug. And yet when addressing the browser its the best thing we've got. I once had a boss of VERY german origin, getting VERY upset with me because I had the audacity to use VBScript to write some client side code back in 2003.

This despite the fact that all the people using the application had IE, but that is a more philosophical question; the fact is that JS is your best bet to have your code run on the MAX of browsers; however judging by the number of browser-checking code branches in the average JS application, its certainly not a good thing.

I like the basis of JS, namely EcmaScript, and have achieved great things in Flash and other applications which implement this syntax to drive their scripting. It plays nice, makes a lot of sense (once you understand prototyping) and is easy for developers to have a common ground, whether they are C++, C# or Java programmers.

The only people all at see in JS are Visual Basic programmers, and quite frankly... they should know better than to try and get their hands dirty in the land of curly brackets. (HA!) : seriously though, I think VB is an unfairly killed language, and I'll be going into that soon enough. (Try teach someone programming with a Basic language, such as VBScript, and you realise where the appeal once lay with this family of languages : its a BREEZE)

JavaScript's greatest weakness isn't a weakness of the language itself, but rather the complete lack of tools and debuggers for the scripting language. For such an established languaged, how can it possibly be so hard to debug?

There are several offerings online, from Eclipse plug-ins to stand alone IDEs, but more often than not, most developers will admit that their JS development tends to involve a text-editor (maybe DW), a bag of alert()'s and a prayer.

This isn't an acceptable situation, and strides made in VS 2008 go a long way to fix such things; but I can't help but feeling that JS will only really take flight when it is completely divorced from the user. ASP.NET Ajax goes a long way in this direction, allowing me to code my app (client side and all...) in C# and see nice efficient JS be pumped out of my server, and I never have to interact with it. That for me is what an programming language should be.

Maybe JS's day will come. But not yet.