Lazycoder

Scripting languages and Microsoft

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Microsoft Missing the Boat on Programming Language Trends

I’ve often said, when writing my 50,000th “alert(hidTxtInput.Text)” statement in Javascript, that the company/person who came out with a full-fledged Javascript IDE and debugger would rule the new world. The Venkman debugger for Firefox comes close, but it’s still a little sketchy when it comes to loading the script and it doesn’t let me write any code any easier than Notepad does. Even just an interactive Shell like Ruby and Python have would be nice. I think secretly Microsoft wishes Javascript would go away. It’s a constant reminder that they don’t own the web from a development POV. HTML is just markup and doesn’t mean much. Flash is pretty, but annoying. But Javascript DOES stuff. It makes the web pages “beep”. That means you don’t need a “smart client” or an application and THAT means that Microsoft has to turn the Titanic again.

Plus there’s the fact that NO ONE at Microsoft EVER looks to see what people outside the company are doing before thinking about the problem themselves. It’s called tunnel vision and a lot of developers get it.