Historians who reflect on JavaScript’s emergence as a dominant programming language in the 21st century may find themselves quoting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might wish to have.”
For growing numbers of programmers, JavaScript is the army we have. As we send it into the field to tackle ever more ambitious engagements both client and server side, we find ourselves battling the language itself.
JavaScript was never intended for large programs built by teams that use sophisticated tools to manage complex communication among internal modules and external libraries. Such teams have long preferred strongly typed languages like Java and C#. But those languages’ virtual machines never found a home in the browser. It was inevitable that JavaScript alternatives and enhancements would target the ubiquitous JavaScript virtual machine.