Is JavaScript the new Lisp?

I seem to have been blissfully unaware of just how far JavaScript has come over the last decade or so.

I wanted to make a foray into mobile app programming (ah ok, nothing serious! Just a toy game or two) — and when I looked around, it looked like I had to deeply immerse myself into either the entire iOS ecosystem or the entire Android ecosystem.

Well, in fact, it’s worse — because I first have to make that choice!

So there are platform-independent alternatives — Xamarin (C#? no thanks), Titanium (maybe) and PhoneGap (heard good things!) Eventually though I came across [this nifty open-source framework], that seemed like it would fit my use case of “a toy game project” just fine.

It was super easy to get started (hey! a simulator in the browser! — contrast that with a completely non-working emulator for Android). But very soon I ran into (what seemed like) a huge problem — how the $#% was I supposed to debug anything here?

The running server (context: the app development environment is basically a node.js environment) just printed nonsensical error messages about “native view: undefined” or some such. This was horrible! How did anyone ever use this?

And then I encountered the obvious solution — the tooling for JavaScript is just really, really good, right out of the box. The simulator mentioned earlier is just another object in my web page — so I can drill into it, print out the values of any running objects, and — isn’t this the live-debugging nirvana? — modify them in-place to fix any error and resume.

The JavaScript console (sorry, my experience so far has only been with Chrome) is phenomenal. I can evaluate anything I like, getting not just text, but entire arbitrary-nested hierarchical objects dumped out for my inspection.

Yes, there is the whole “dynamic types => errors from typos” problem, and I ran into this pretty early on when a missing comma gave me a lot of grief. But this is somewhat made up by the source-level debugging at the console, where I can see the problem, and fix it right away!

WTF? Everything just works? And they’re tons of libraries too!

And here I was, thinking that the solution to the Lisp GUI problem was to tie in Webkit bindings to an MVC framework, to create a modern version of CLIM — but there’s already a (non-lispy) version of that out there!

(I’m confused)