Re: [xml-dev] JavaScript (was Re: [xml-dev] Whither XML ?)

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 11/11/2010 12:34, David wrote:
> My concern about JavaScript in the browser as the "VM of the Browser" 
> is its lack of binary data support.

I think the poor support for primitive data types is one valid 
objection. Another, expressed eloquently by Steven Pemberton in his talk 
at XML Holland this morning, is that a language with weak data typing is 
increasingly hard to debug as the size of the program increases: the 
larger the program becomes, the greater the distance between the point 
at which a program is wrong and the point at which the symptoms appear; 
so development effort is much worse than linear with the size of the 
program. This effect is very noticeable also with XSLT, where adding 
type declarations to variables and parameters is the first thing I do 
when asked for help in debugging a user stylesheet that lacks such 
declarations. This objection is reduced a little if one regards 
Javascript as an intermediate language which users don't actually write 
by hand. But if one were designing a language for that purpose, 
Javascript isn't exactly the language you would come up with.

Michael Kay
Saxonica