Communications of the ACM
Is It Time For Javascript to Step Aside For the Next Big 'web' Thing?
At Microsoft's recent Lang.Next conference, a panel of experts discussed various aspects of programming, agreeing that JavaScript is an unforgiving language but is still necessary in today's world.
The panel included Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg, Typesafe chairman Martin Odersky, Newspeak creator Gilad Bracha, and University of California, Berkeley researcher Peter Alvaro.
Hejlsberg says his goal has always been to make programmers more productive, and he believes the next big thing for developers is machine learning. Hejlsberg also notes that the new cross-platform language is JavaScript, although he says it can be difficult to write big programs with it.
Bracha, a member of the team building the new Dart language at Google, says that language is better-suited for writing large programs. Google recently introduced an early preview of Dart, a class-based optionally typed programming language for building Web applications.
The panel also discussed the benefits of functional programming versus imperative programming. "The challenge we try to solve is, we have to move from sequential programming to parallel programming, and we have to shift from imperative programming to functional programming" to do so, Odersky says.
From eWeek
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