I used to hate javascript back in the day. I found the language ugly and was essentially a hack to make HTML code work in unintended ways, and introduced popup boxes to the internet.

But eventually I understood that most of the faults was not due to the language, but due to DOM, lack of discipline in coding standards, and HTML/XML style mark-up <> tags messing up my impression of javascript.

As more important applications around us are all written as web-apps, javascript will become the most important language, as every device with a browser will be capable of running its applications.

Recently I’ve been reading up on JSON data standard, and NoSQL database systems, and it is evident that they will replace how we manage data in the future, evolving from inflexible SQL type schema-based databases from the 1990’s.  Much of this work was introduced/evangelised by Doug Crockford.  He also wrote a great book on javascript programming, and authored the JSLint tool for increasing the level of coding standards.

Nowadays when one is looking to build large javascript projects, one has to understand higher level concepts, standard object creation patterns, module creation, and build processes.  Gone are the days when one can load up a text editor and hack out some inline javascript to throwout some ugly popup boxes and call themselves a professional developer.