Dylan Schiemann

In hearing that the next version of Java will have JavaScript built-in, I was reminded of the old evolution of man t-shirts promoting soccer. For those unfamiliar, the shirt started with a football player crouched down on the left side, progressing to various apes/monkeys standing more and more upright, finally evolving to a fully upright soccer player.

So what does that have to do with Java and JavaScript? I make this comparison to Java, because Java seems to be having a similar, unexpected evolution to JavaScript. In the beginning Java started out as a rigourous language with very strict rules for typing and syntax. It allowed a lot of great things to be built, but it was overly verbose. Then came things like beans, and numerous other libraries and revisions which tried to simplify the verbosity. Then came the IDE argument, which said that Java is complex, so just use an IDE to hide away all of the details. Then came the XML evolution, which recommended putting as many details as possible in XML configuration files, so that you again don’t have to write any actual code. The problem is, XML is verbose, and describing programmatic behavior through XML is not easy. Alas, there are now plans to bolt JavaScript into the next version of Java. So now you’ll be able to use a freeer scripting language so that you do not have to write as much XML or Java code. The irony is that the evolution of the Java developer, who just a few years ago scorned the once lowly JavaScript developer, is now clamoring to evolve into a JavaScript developer.