Really? You're discounting all of the incredible webapps, games, and social networking on the web. If Javascript was bad for innovation, I sure don't see it.
You're talking language syntax. Although it matters, it practically doesn't. People build stuff no matter what the language looks like. Look at Obj-C, that thing is horrid (syntax-wise) but look at all the developer adoption.
What is bad for innovation is to move back to the 90's where people had to handle local instances of applications, fix versioning problems, and have to install something just because they want one small piece of functionality.
> If Javascript was bad for innovation, I sure don't see it.
This is a fallacy: in absence of a peek at some alternative world where something else was available, you can't tell that javascript improved or worsened the innovation rate.
It seems pretty reasonable to observe the desktop world, though, since it has the properties under discussion, and ask ourselves whether it's easier to deploy an application to a wide audience there or on the web.
Well, the problem is that this confounds all the properties of "the desktop world" with the properties of another client-side substitute for Javascript (like, say, Dart or some language using NaCl)
You're talking language syntax. Although it matters, it practically doesn't. People build stuff no matter what the language looks like. Look at Obj-C, that thing is horrid (syntax-wise) but look at all the developer adoption.
What is bad for innovation is to move back to the 90's where people had to handle local instances of applications, fix versioning problems, and have to install something just because they want one small piece of functionality.