I guess most of you have read the latest happenings in the whole NBL-story. Steve Yegge have created a Rhino on Rails; a JavaScript version of Rails. I have meant to write about this for a few weeks, but I felt I wanted to think it through before writing about it.

Of course, it’s really cool that Rhino on Rails exists, and may someday be open sourced. On the other hand, the current version have no counterpart to ActiveRecord – instead it works against internal Google data systems. This may make very good sense from the pov of Google, but will make it hard to gain traction outside of Google when/if the open sourcing happens. At that point, a ActiveRecord version written using JDBC and Rails should happen. I’m personally looking forward to it, because such an undertaking would be able to take more advantage of JDBC than for example ActiveRecord-JDBC can do. ActiveRecord done “right” so to speak, but in JavaScript.

But is JavaScript the language of the future? What does it have that separates it from other current languages – most notably Ruby? Well, at first glance the big difference is in the amount of implementations. JavaScript have a multitude of implementations, while Ruby has three (Ruby, YARV? and JRuby), with many more in the works. JavaScript though, have a incredible amount of implementations, most of them bad.

It’s got a standard. It’s got full closures and a few more neat futures. And it has prototype object orientation; a very different object model compared to the standard of inheritance based object systems like Java, Ruby and Smalltalk.

On closer inspection, the prototype based object system is not really such a big deal. In fact, you already have it in Ruby. Just use Object.new and Kernel.clone. Not very practical in Ruby, but you can do it without any problem. Remember that the difference between dup and clone is that clone will actually copy the metaclass of the object, while dup just makes the duplicate use the same real class.

I see some advantages that JavaScript has over Ruby, that can actually count as real advantages. The spec is arguably one. Several good implementations is another. It’s easier to make JavaScript have good performance. And maybe most important: most developers already know it to some degree or other.

But will it be the NBL in some form or another? No, I don’t think so, for the simple reason that to many developers hate it. Not because of the language itself, but due to the connection with bad browser implementations. This is a debt that it will be very hard for JS to get away from, and I think it will tip the point against JavaScript compared any other language poised for the position of being a big language.

Further, I really don’t believe in the idea that there will be a next big language. Call me strange, but just because we’ve had this cycle two or three times doesn’t mean it will continue like that. I believe development is qualitively different now compared to 15 years ago. The challenges we meet are different and demand different tools. One single language will not cut it. I think the future lies in layered languages with different properties.

7 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: javascript, next big language, rhino on rails, ruby. | #