Speaking at QCon London 2012 today, Mozilla Research Fellow Allen Wirfs-Brock laid out what he believes will be the future of the ECMAScript specification. Among the technical details, he included some broader thoughts about the role of JavaScript, predicting that the language will be “the canonical programming language for the next 20+ years.”

Wirfs-Brock began with a familiar division of recent computing history into three stages: the ‘business computing’ era, dominated by mainframe systems from firms such as IBM; the ‘personal computing’ era, which was spearheaded by the grand Wintel alliance; and the ‘ambient computing’ era, a brave new browser-based world that has arisen over the past five-to-ten years. He emphasised the crucial foothold that JavaScript already has, and cited Richard Gabriel’s ‘worse is better’ maxim to explain why any young pretender to JS’s client-side crown (cough-Google Dart-cough) is unlikely to succeed.