Ahh... I think we all miss Big Stevey. He role was never replaced and it's a shame for our entire community.
I'm glad this was posted. It was written four years ago (Feb. 2007), and his quote is, "[The NBL] is going to arrive very soon (timeline: 18-24 months ...)" He later gave away that he was thinking the NBL was to be server-side Javascript. You have to hand it to him; that was a great guess, even if the timeline was off.
Looking at Yegge's projects, I think NBL was just "javascript". The first big one was a rails clone on Rhino, which he talked about but never released (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QD9XQm_Jd4).
So, I think NBL was just "Javascript". Awesome call. Despite the problems with the standards process, JS has exploded in popularity over the past three years.
How was that a great guess? Certainly things could change, but very very very few people are doing server side JS right now. That could change, but I'm still pretty skeptical. Node.js (if that's what you're thinking of) is still very much in the experimental stage.
He doesn't say it will be ubiquitous in that timeframe. You'd have to be pretty crazy to think that. He means it will arrive. Which is correct. The thing is, javascript is what's available in all devices. And it's a pretty nice language.
it's also showing up in other things. I believe KDE is using it as the primary scripting language for their stuff. Apple has dipped it's toe in that water with the dashboard widgets. etc
Incidentally, i actually am doing server side javascript, but on Rhino, instead of node. I'm certain that Stevey meant Rhino, rather than node when he wrote that particular blog post.
He was off on one item for sure: good tools for Javascript OUTSIDE web development.
I am currently in the middle of a 100k(not all mine) LOC embbeded Javascript project consisting of multiple files and it is rough going.
Eclipse IDE for JavaScript Web Developers is the crutch I am currently using, it feels better than most commercial packages I tried(Aptana, Komodo, etc.), but that is not saying much.
What I want most is the ability to reliably zoom in and out of functions, but the indexing over multiple files is quite shoddy.
The bad habits Javascript encourages make for frustrating reading of code (like where did that foo.bar just come from, if bar was not a property in the initial declaration of foo). Not everybody reads Crockford...
Until Javascript is feasible on larger projects, it will not be general purpose NBL.
I'm glad this was posted. It was written four years ago (Feb. 2007), and his quote is, "[The NBL] is going to arrive very soon (timeline: 18-24 months ...)" He later gave away that he was thinking the NBL was to be server-side Javascript. You have to hand it to him; that was a great guess, even if the timeline was off.