Not being able to hotswap when debugging is a productivity pain for me. I'm in the C# world, and edit-n-continue is severely limited. JRebel is very good with doing hotswap with Java, but it has its limitations too. Ideally, I'd like a programming environment to go into interpreted mode so that if a change is made and its horribly wrong, it just throws an exception.

The fact that none of them have succeeded is more due to inertia than anything else. Again, this doesn't take anything away from the fact that that statically typed languages are the future and even Javascript won't be dodging this evolution for much longer.

Ruby and Python were the latest victims of this trend, Javascript will clearly be next, even if it might take years.

Isn't javascript younger than all of the poster static languages? Why didn't inertia help any of them beat it? (It is amusing that it was called JavaScript to capitalize the popularity of Java.)

I mean, ultimately, I think I agree with you. But at the rate things are moving, I expect my children will still learn JavaScript. And probably C.

The reason why JavaScript has succeeded where many other languages, whether statically typed or not, have failed, is that it was bundled with a runtime platform - the web browser - that became ubiquitous.

Millions of people want to write programs that runs in a web browser, and it's easiest to do that in JavaScript.

JavaScript is a textbook example of "worse-is-better", and you are right, for compatibility reasons we are going to be stuck with it until long past its best-before date, just like C.

That was the point I meant when I said the the ultimate tooling a language needs is a runtime that is widely distributed.