Is JavaScript the future of mainstream application programmers?

Lately, mainstream application programming has been steadily moving towards the web. Traditional desktop applications are being moved to the web. This gives me the terrifying feeling that one day we might become JavaScript programmers, breaking our heads writing script for some weird browser!

Read this article by Joel, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html

He says that history is repeating itself. In the early 1990s, Windows and Macintosh kind of standardized the UI and how applications interact with one other. And now as we are moving all applications to the web, and we will again need to standardize the UI on the web and how web applications interact with one other. Eg. We don't have a way to copy a photo from Picasaweb and pasting it in some other website.

I think that's why everyone is trying to create their own array of services so that it will be easy for them to create ways for the services to interact with one and other and give the user a consistent experience. Eg. Google has a common user account for all of google's services like Gmail, Orkut, Blogspot which does make life easier.

And for custom development, they release a JavaScript based API for web application developers to create their websites which can interact with that array of services. Eg. Google AJAX Search API

Joel says that the winner will be the company who can come up with a language and compiler which generates JavaScript for different browsers. Someday we will have features like copy/paste to move objects between different web applications like we do with the Windows clipboard! And JavaScript code will be in MBs!