Can we imaginate web should have others scripting languages to manipulate DOM and other web API?
Today web have regulary a lot of new features. a new language should not be added to the spec?
<script type="text/python" src="script/main.py">
<--! for example... -->
(Of course this question is not about preprocessors or compile language to js)
Back in the day, ActiveX was Microsoft's alternative to Javascript. Specific to Internet Explorer obviously, it was pretty powerful and robust.
Technically, Flash is an alternative to Javascript as well but clearly, that's on it's way out.
Javascript will too be replaced one day; just happens now it's what's popular.
This is a good question. Because it's not like browsers couldn't implement another language if the wanted to.
I think it comes down to a few things. First, JS has a governing body that sets a standard about what the language should support. It's vendor agnostic and has some really smart people on it making good (most of the time) decisions about the language. That would be hard to reproduce.
Second, browsers have a hard enough time keeping performance and implementing features in JS let alone another language.
Third, we've already seen that other compile to JS languages can implement their own spec and then just compile really good, performant JS code that gets run in the browser. JS is just leveraged like assembly with C.
Marco Alka
Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor
Because adding additional languages means
I am so very happy that we finally have 1 spec everyone follows. If we start deviating now, browser-wars with missing features and languages will start again.
By the way, it's not like people didn't try to introduce new languages, however even giants, like Google, failed hard, when they proposed stuff like Dart to the world.
No matter what, there will always be people unhappy with the selection of languages, so let's just focus on the important things in one language instead of distributing resources :)