I found this blog post recently that might be relevant here. Theres some nice background info on the blog(also about DX development), but it feels a bit like 'former employee trying to be offensive', also beware of possibly unsafe for work picture.

http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/07/25/the-advent-of-web-3d/

For clarity, I'm not arguing whether or not Javascript is bad, but I'm wondering if there could be other or even better alternatives to Javascript.

For clarity, I'm not arguing whether or not Javascript is bad, but I'm wondering if there could be other or even better alternatives to Javascript.

Yes there can, and yes there are. They are generally implemented as browser plugins. Flash and Java are the two prime examples, and Shockwave, Silverlight/Moonlight, and the Unity3D Plugin are also fairly popular.

Flash has gained native browser support for several browsers. Java once had direct browser support for a time both through Netscape and through what was once called the HotSpot web browser; the release model and continuous flow of bugs made Netscape decouple it, and HotSpot evolved out of being a compiler attached to a generic web browser, it dropped the browser aspect moving into a general Java development tool.

JavaScript is definitely not the quickest programming language out there. As Brandon Jones, the creator of the glMatrix lib, said about JS libs: "Even the most naive of C matrix libs would run circles around the best javascript libs." No matter what you end up doing, JS just isn't going to be quick, although engines like V8 have helped a lot.

I don't think JS is going anywhere anytime soon. It's seen a resurgence in the past few years and newer, shinier technologies are building on it, like WebGL. Combine that with popular libs like Node.js and jQuery and you've got a recipe for staying power. There are certainly other languages out there better suited for any task than JS, but they might never overtake JS's popularity. I'd say, for right now, it's the language of the client-side Web.

In my own opinion, AS is a more dynamic language than JS,

This answered my question.

however the question is "what is the next big thing? " .

This completely twisted my question into something else

I know that ClojureScript has been trying to make some headway into the client-side arena.

The last two languages I've toyed with have been ActionScript 3 and JavaScript. I certainly don't have anything more than a basic knowledge of either, but I really wasn't especially impressed with ActionScript. Some of its features seemed nice on paper, but didn't work that well in practice. The first example that comes to mind is working with a class (not written by me) that had variable number of constructor arguments (with the ... notation). It worked perfectly fine until I needed to extend that class and found that there was in fact no way to pass those arguments to the superconstructor. I guess the idea is that you wouldn't use a variable number of arguments in that case, but it still seemed like a pretty arbitrary limitation to me.

In any event, I don't think JavaScript is necessarily better (and it certainly has weird quirks), but at least so far I haven't found myself desperately wishing I was using ActionScript instead. I could change my opinion as I gain more experience, but for now I wouldn't be too sad if Flash just kind of went away altogether, and it does seem that its dominance is waning quite a bit.

Because we can now compile almost *anything* into Javascript, and the ability will only increase, I don't think it's a problem.

Everyone is now targetting Javascript - Adobe Flash, we have LLVM (enscripten). And Mozilla's "asm.js" - which is just an extension of Javascript (actually, erm, a reduced set of JS, but with an efficient native compiler) means that we might be able to approach (in some cases) native performance using Javascript.

So I think that all the other things - Dart, NaCl etc, are just distractions, all roads appear to lead to Javascript. Although we're all using js under the covers, many of us won't be writing much of it however.

Yes there can, and yes there are. They are generally implemented as browser plugins. Flash and Java are the two prime examples, and Shockwave, Silverlight/Moonlight, and the Unity3D Plugin are also fairly popular.

By what definition are flash and java better than Javascript for the web? They are both dying out rather quickly now and for a good reason.

Yes there can, and yes there are. They are generally implemented as browser plugins. Flash and Java are the two prime examples, and Shockwave, Silverlight/Moonlight, and the Unity3D Plugin are also fairly popular.

By what definition are flash and java better than Javascript for the web? They are both dying out rather quickly now and for a good reason.

Java is still going strong for app development ...

Am I wrong or is compiling Dart to JavaScript just a temporary solution? I thought they will try to really establish it once Browsers implement a certain planned abstraction standard that will allow other scripting languages besides JavaScript to run natively.

And what motivation does Microsoft or Mozilla have to run Dart in their browsers?