this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Programming
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I'm for saying "fuck JavaScript" and moving on to something more sane. Even visual basic for the web would make sense. LUA for the web, or even Python, but fuck JavaScript.
I say let oracle have it. Let the language die.
It would be really hard to coordinate such a huge move. And JavaScript is the most used language in the world, "letting it die" would mean making a whole lot of software die.
This lawsuit isn't just about JavaScript, it's also to keep the integrity of the courts.
Microsoft tried to add VBScript to Internet Explorer in 1996, and the ghost of it lurked around in IE until it was old enough to drive. It never caught on.
VBScript did catch on originally, though. When IE had over 90% market share, it was nearly as popular as JavaScript was. It only dropped in popularity when other browsers became more common. Back then, most scripting was just to enhance the page, and the page still had full functionality without it, so a lot of developers just didn't care about making it fancy for the 5-10% of other browsers.
"AJAX" (XMLHttpRequest) was originally an IE-only, VBScript-only feature. It was originally implemented using ActiveX, which only VBScript supported originally.
I'm hoping that more DOM and BOM APIs become accessible in WebAssembly without having to go through JavaScript. There's a few frameworks that let you build web apps in other languages (like Blazor for C#) but they still need some JavaScript to interop with the browser, and going through a translation layer (WASM to JS to browser) adds some overhead.
This is exactly what I did for a few years before switching to JavaScript: VBScript. It was pretty common back in the early 2000s when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. The few remaining Netscape users would just get a page without scripts. There's a lot of features missing in VBScript that exist in JavaScript though, even basic things like closures and first-class functions.