Hi.

> Threads are a debugging and maintenance nightmare. (...) 
> I recommend against using them for nearly all applications.

You can't resonably expect an app server talking to several databases 
simultaneously and serving up thousands of clients could do without threads. 
You also can't reasonably expect that your web app running on that app server 
could ignore these issues. However, I agree that you should be able to leave 
most of threads-related issues to a framework, and not do all nitty-gritty 
housekeeping yourself. I think, however, that a language/platform not providing 
access to the threading mechanism would be crippled. ASP.Net does try this, and 
I really dislike what you have to do there.

>> performance/memory footprint is problem, 
I still have to see something like this. However, since there's no widely 
deployed server-side javascript-based solution around, we can't really know. 
Java and C#/.Net have very smart optimization mechanisms for app servers, which 
Javascript couldn't possibly have, due to lack of static typing and proper 
linking, for instance. I'm pretty sure, however, that once it's a problem, 
alternative optimizing approaches would evolve.

> Type-safe is highly over-rated.
You wish! Type safety stems from static typing, and static typing has nothing 
to do (well, maybe just a little) with mem allocation nowadays. It has to do 
with the compiler being able to detect heaps of errors way before you even 
thought about writing a unit test, and with the IDE being able to provide stuff 
like autocompletion. In large projects,  it's a very useful feature. Tell me 
you never wanted to have proper intellisense in Javascript code.

>> and there are no libraries. 
But there are contribs :)

> My biggest problem with JavaScript as a language is its non-standard 
> prototype-based object model.
How so? Javascript's prototype-based model is standard ECMA 626, and has 
reached version 3. Last time I looked, it was planned that version 4 will be 
skipped and version 5 will contain some static typing mechanisms, and other 
features to make it look more like a more traditional OO language. The fact 
that most OO languages out there use a class-based rather than a 
prototype-based approach to OO doesn't mean that a prototype-based approach is 
less worthy.

> Personally I think that 
> javascript is so much used now only because there is no other choice.
I don't think so. Especially nowadays flexibility of a language is becoming 
more and more important. Show me a single language more flexible than 
Javascript, without the obvious formatting drawbacks of python (no IDE can 
properly reformat python sources with scrambled indents, whereas Javascript 
doesn't suffer from this). IMO, once Javascript breaks the browser jail, and 
interpreters start properly implementing the new ECMA-262 v5 standard, or may 
be an even newer  standard, which adds static typing and linking features to 
the language, Javascript will become a lot more usable, and will be 
increasingly used in larger projects.

br,

flj

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