JavaScript is Dead. Long Live JavaScript

OK, this is going to be light on fact and heavy on impressions. I admit to not having much to go on, other than my own memory of history. I'm simply spewing intuition here.

I just took a whiff of a new programming language. Something smelled wrong.  It reminded me of 

• Fully blown Corba enterprise standards
• C++ for business applications
• Java for the Web
• W3C XML Schema Language 
• Web Services Standards (pick just about any)

It is not that there isn't some merit to each of these, but each egregiously forces a practice of making many decisions early in the design process; they do so in the name of performance; and they all suck because they embed too much cruft in the deployed systems.

The language I smelled was Google's Dart. It smells an awful lot like Java, from the tooling (Eclipse) to the static typing (uh, "optional" static typing). Then there's the 17 thousand + line of code "Hello World" example. But OK, even gcc compiles Hello World to around 8k on an OSX machine. (Then again, that's machine code gcc is compiling into on a desktop, not scripted source in a Web browser.) 

If Google wants to push an alternative to Java, more power to them. But they should not have done it under the pretense of killing JavaScript, or of making open Web scripting easier with enterprise tooling. That's just a little bit "evil".