‘The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it,’ says JSON creator Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford says JavaScript should be retired because it has become a barrier to progress. He points to the language’s growing complexity, the pressure to keep adding features, and the need for a new language that would be more like E and better suited to secure distributed programming.

The article also explains why JavaScript still dominates: it was created quickly for Netscape, became widely used, and later gained performance and ecosystem support through engines like V8, Node.js, and tools such as bundlers and TypeScript. Crockford says replacing it would also require browser makers to adopt a new language and replace the DOM with a well designed interface.

Reading notes

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• Douglas Crockford argues that JavaScript has turned from a useful language into a barrier to progress.
• He says he once advocated for JavaScript and tried to fix its flaws, with only limited success in ES5.
• He criticizes the continued expansion of the language instead of improving it.
• He says the next language should look more like E than JavaScript.
• The article notes that JavaScript remains the most widely used programming language in many surveys.
• Its success is linked to its ease of learning, browser support, and later performance gains from engines such as V8, SpiderMonkey, and JavaScriptCore.
• Node.js and NPM expanded JavaScript beyond the browser and made it central to many web development workflows.
• The article says modern JavaScript development often depends on build tools like WebPack and Rollup.
• It notes that many developers write TypeScript instead of plain JavaScript because of JavaScript’s lack of type safety.
• Crockford says replacing JavaScript would require a new secure distributed language and browser makers would need to replace the DOM at the same time.