The tragedy is, a lot of people are going to cheer Brendan Eich on in his response to Microsoft's Chris Wilson - simply because it's the "good guys" against the "bad guys". However, I had a bunch of red flags go off when I read this:

The pattern of general assertions about small being beautiful and sufficient for web application developers' needs, met by specific arguments listing use-cases where JS does not scale in time or space, or lacks basic data integrity, type safety, and programming in the large support, in turn met by absolutely zero specific counter-arguments -- this is a pattern we have seen over and over in TG1 this year.

If things go that way, I expect to see a larger, more baroque, harder to understand Javascript come out the other end. I've seen this movie before - it's what happened to Java when they added generics. I suspect that the best thing possible for the wider community would be a nasty fight at the standards board that prevented any "progress".

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