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With the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, scripting languages and other dynamic languages are
currently experiencing a renaissance. A whole new generation of programmers are growing up with languages
such as JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The attention that dynamic languages are receiving is remarkable,
and is something that has not occurred since the early days of personal computers and the
BASIC programming language in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
At the same time, the web is becoming the de facto
target platform for advanced software applications,
including social networking systems, games, productivity
applications, and so on. Software systems that were
conventionally written using static programming
languages such as C, C++ or Java™, are now built
with dynamic languages that were originally
designed for scripting rather than full-scale
application development.
At Sun Labs, we have created a new, highly dynamic
web programming environment called the Lively Kernel
that is built entirely around JavaScript. As part of
this effort, we have written a lot of JavaScript
code and applications that exercise the JavaScript
language in a different fashion than the typical
JavaScript programs found on commercial web sites.
Among other things, we have used JavaScript as a
systems programming language to write the Lively
Kernel itself.
In this paper we summarize our experiences using JavaScript,
focusing especially on its use as a real, general-purpose
programming language
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