> With one single standardized language we have fragmentation across browsers which sometimes causes problems. Allowing arbitrary languages would be a nightmare.
I'm not sure about that.
One thing i really dislike about web development is that it's so unnecessary complicated to say "i want to use ECMASript 5 for this web page" and then let the browser decide what to do, either just stupidly show an error message, or, more intelligently, download the necessary components to make ECMAScript 5 work, kind of what a package manager would do. If the web would have been polyglot from the start (in the scripting language side), i think it's not far fetched to imagine that browsers could have adopted a similar approach to the later one.
Really, i feel it's really stupid that we've been fallen into this "beware, <browser X> doesn't support Array::map!" trap, instead of "how silly, Array::map didn't exist because i didn't mark my <script> tag with language=ecmascript5, now it does :)". I can't but feel that Only One Scripting Language to Rule Them All mentality brought us here.
But anyway, the What Would Have Happened If won't take us anywhere. The decision for us to make is: do we embrace a polyglot/package managed like architecture now, or do we continue with (re)standardising the one and only web scripting language?
I'm not sure about that.
One thing i really dislike about web development is that it's so unnecessary complicated to say "i want to use ECMASript 5 for this web page" and then let the browser decide what to do, either just stupidly show an error message, or, more intelligently, download the necessary components to make ECMAScript 5 work, kind of what a package manager would do. If the web would have been polyglot from the start (in the scripting language side), i think it's not far fetched to imagine that browsers could have adopted a similar approach to the later one.
Really, i feel it's really stupid that we've been fallen into this "beware, <browser X> doesn't support Array::map!" trap, instead of "how silly, Array::map didn't exist because i didn't mark my <script> tag with language=ecmascript5, now it does :)". I can't but feel that Only One Scripting Language to Rule Them All mentality brought us here.
But anyway, the What Would Have Happened If won't take us anywhere. The decision for us to make is: do we embrace a polyglot/package managed like architecture now, or do we continue with (re)standardising the one and only web scripting language?