With JavaScript becoming one of the most widely used languages around, I began a

Question

With JavaScript becoming one of the most widely used languages around, I began asking myself why people do not find ways to use it extensively on the JVM. As a programmer who spends half day writing Java, and the other half, writing JavaScript, I do see a lot of potential in this.

Was it just the timing that shot Scala up straight? Or the nature of the language itself. Although JavaScript and Java are fundamentally different languages, it is certainly not a problem to compile JS to Java bytecode. That's what Rhino has been doing for many years, right? Or the maybe the problem lies in the performance?

Whatever it is, I would be interested to know.

Explanation / Answer

Scala had a considerable head start over the recent popularity of JavaScript, but that is not the only reason. Scala is intimately connected to the specification and implementation of Java. It was written by the principal author of javac specifically to fix all the perceived flaws in Java that he wasn't able to overcome during the earlier project. To M. Odersky, Scala is the perfect language for competent programmers that can run on the JVM without requiring incompatible changes. It is hard to imagine another alternative language that was better poised to win the "alternative" crown, and it didn't happen.

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