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Ask HN: What’s preventing us from moving away from JavaScript?

by grandimam on 12/22/24, 6:34 PM with 5 comments

Despite advancements in technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI Agents, whats stopping us from replacing our existing stack and rethinking something completely new - an example is the current web ecosystem — especially JavaScript — which I believe is a significantly limiting language that is at the core of the web browser, whats stopping us from building something superior?

  • by thesuperbigfrog on 12/22/24, 6:55 PM

    >> What’s holding us back?

    Inertia.

    It takes a lot of time, effort, money, and consensus to replace the current status quo with something else.

    Unless there is a significant motivation to change things will stay the same or slowly evolve as all things do in tech.

    Similar examples that are somewhat debatable are:

    Arm-based processors over x86-based processors

    Rust over C / C++

    Electric vehicles over internal combustion vehicles

    Et cetera . . .

    The existence of alternatives is not enough to displace the status quo.

    What alternative to the current web ecosystem are you envisioning? Pure WASM? Something else?

  • by solardev on 12/23/24, 2:41 PM

    The browser duopoly. Google and Apple control the Web through Chrome and Safari.

    Apple doesn't really care about the web as much as its native apps and is usually very slow to implement any new web features. They don't want the web to win because that means they lose 30% app store revenue.

    Google is too lost and leaderless to take big risks. They want to just keep milking the ad dollars as long as they can. Chrome changes are more about increasing ad revenue (eg manifest V3) than making the stack better.

    Neither company is incentivized to make the web better.

    Microsoft tried many times (activeX, asp, .net, clickonce, etc.) and failed because people don't trust them with their "embrace extend extinguish" history.

    Firefox is a has-been rounding error at this point.

    There's nobody else to champion a better web and break the network effect stranglehold of Chrome and Safari. The only major innovation we see in the web space are from Cloudflare and Vercel, but they work on and around the existing web stack rather than reinventing it altogether.

  • by theandrewbailey on 12/22/24, 7:23 PM

    The web was originally built to read documents. It's only somewhat recently that it's been twisted into an app platform, but there's enough features for most people to build on. I think that in order to move from Javascript, the web might have to be replaced by something else. What's stopping that? Its already everywhere and works for most use cases.

  • by wmf on 12/22/24, 9:04 PM

    This has already been done; there are multiple languages/frameworks that compile directly to WASM with no JS such as https://yew.rs/