The creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich was asked about the programming languages and the time

Seibel: In general do you feel like languages are getting better over time?

Eich: I think so, yeah. Maybe we’re entering the second golden age; there’s more interest in languages and more language creation. We talk about programming: we need to keep practicing the craft—it’s like writing or music. But the language that you use—the tonal system—matters too. Language matters. So we should be evolving programming languages; we shouldn’t be sitting still. Because the Web demands compatibility, JavaScript may have to sit still too much. But we shouldn’t get stuck by that; we should either make a better JavaScript, even if it doesn’t replace the one on the Web, or we should move beyond that.

You see stuff like Ruby, which took influences from Ada and Smalltalk. That’s great. I don’t mind eclecticism. Though Ruby does seem kind of overhyped. Nothing bad about it, just sometimes the fan boys make it sound like the second coming and it’s going to solve all your problems, and that’s not the case. We should have new languages but they should not be overhyped. Like the C++ hype, the whole “design patterns will save us.” Though maybe they were reacting to the conservatism of the Unix C world of the ’80s.

But at some point we have to have better languages. And the reason is to have proof assistants or proof systems, to have some kind of automatic verification of some claims you’re making in your code. You won’t get all of them, right? And the dynamic tools like Valgrind and its race detectors, that’s great too. There’s no silver bullet, as Brooks said, but there are better languages and we should migrate to them as we can.

Coders At Work – Page 147 – Brendan Eich