Erik Meijer, Dave Thomas and Pratap Lakshman: Perspectives on JavaScript and Language Design

I understand the points about having a few powerful building blocks will allow you to do 'anything', but I think theres a very naive and ignorant view in that interview that more complex languages are somewhat the worser designed.. and the points about generics was laughable.. how long did it take for people to adopt generics? people were suffucating waiting for generics to happen.. it was adopted instantly because it had such a fantastic clean advantage over previous methods..

Not only this, simple blocks are great, but a lot of power comes from the tools, and its impossible for your tools to understand how it can effectively help you use the fancy building you just made with those powerful blocks.. and I think you'll start to get very verbose code that cannot be as effectively 'understood' by a compiler..

Where as building a house in the language, your compiler and tools all realize '.. oh, thats a house - I can help use it because I can infer a lot for you, and I can compile this really well because I understand what the point of a house is'..

You should also take into consideration that the boom in javascript is mainly by people who couldn't care less about it, people who just want to ajax/web2.0 up their site.. and maybe don't even care all that much about development/languages/programming/whatever.

I'd also like to add that the inability to at least express 'threading' in javascript is probably going to be one of the limiting factors - its one of the missing 'power blocks' it could of done with.. isolation alone does't really work - thats like the appdomain, and while thats good for the big picture.. imagine the scenario now where I have a script thats job is to populate a panel with some data it receives from a ajax source.. the events the browser provides me are great, I get called when the data returns and I can update my ui.. imagine I wanted to poll for changes to that data, or I wanted to poll for some changes that were happening.. if my panel say.. animates - now when I animate my animation code has to fight with the polling that happens.. and now you start to get stuttering in the animation.. for a developer thats tough luck.. you don't have enough control.. to me, this shows where having more blocks is the better.. you don't have to use those blocks - but if they exist, and you situation requires.. that block exists for you to use.