But the reason I’m responding is your point 2.

See, I *love* anything that empowers people by giving them a way into coding.

To my mind, there was an alarmingly long period between the era of the home computer with BASIC or whatever (my own way in) and that today of the browser with Javascript. During this dark age you had to jump through quite a few hoops to get started on developing software. For a while it seems the entrance points were CGI scripts under your place of education’s web server, or going via Excel to Visual Basic. A real baptism of fire! There have been attempts to address the need for something simple and useful (I was a Hackety Hack fan myself – see http://anthonybailey.net/tumblelog/2007/04/28/hacking-it-for-the-kids) but these never get traction.

So yay for the modern browser that can pose as a Javascript application IDE.

We are where we are with the language in question, which could be much worse. But there are two directions in which I wish we could nudge the default ecosystem to unlock some of the remaining gates a beginner developer still has to pass through as they begin their development journey.

Javascript is a rather unopinionated language, and the resulting lack of initial constraints reduces its effectiveness as a framework for first-time learning. TIMTOWTDI can be great for later explorations, but when you start then it’s easier to learn Python than Perl. The DOM helps a bit, so writing code on top of a single page (e.g. a GreaseMonkey script) can be quickly rewarding. But where do you go from there? Can we supply better signposts?

And it bugs me that at the point you want to use code assets outside the first page that you load then you have to jump all the way to running a local webserver, because the default security model in all modern browsers will trust localhost, but not your local file://-system. Seems this is really going to get in the way of a neophyte. (I may be projecting here – but hell, it put me off some of my own experiments with Backbone.js – I wanted to be able to write and distribute a simple offline web app, but I can’t ask my user to run a webserver!) I don’t see why browsers can’t trust e.g. subdirectories of the filesystem.