Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
&gt; It used to be that we’d get new computer languages about every generation. […] And then it kind of stopped. There are still people developing languages, but nobody cares.<p>I think this is false. We can see great interest in new languages, and I feel like languages like Rust and Go have achieved to move the ball forward significantly for backend &#x2F; system software development.<p>It&#x27;s just that noone has been able to replicate that kind of success in the web-based frontend space.<p>This happened in the case of Rust and Go after LOTS of searching for better alternatives to C&#x2F;C++ and later Java. There are a lot of failed attempts along the way, and some which find their niche but fail to displace the older generation languages in any meaningful way.<p>There has been TypeScript and Dart and transpilers that have tried to shield us from the horrors of JavaScript development, but in the end they still are too closely related to JavaScript and its runtime to truly displace it. I feel like we have an opportunity now, with WebAssembly, to move beyond these limitations.<p>If browsers and web standards move to a point where we can use WebAssembly as a first class citizen, without the need for JavaScript scaffolding, we could see the rise of a new crop of languages for the frontend. Perhaps even making it possible to remove JavaScript entirely and move it into a WebAssembly module eventually, to remove it as the default choice and put it on equal footing with new alternatives.<p>We could take the lessons we have learned from other modern languages, and apply them more natively to frontend problems and practices, with language-native tooling and a higher level of integration in those tools than we have been able to achieve with JavaScript.