Link Details

Short answer: no.
Long answer: no.

Short answer: no
Long answer: Was there really anything to kill?

Worth a read. He's not the first person to suggest this. Steve Yegge said the same thing a year and a half or so ago.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html

JavaScript is simply here to stay - Ruby ... well, we'll see

JavaScript is and will always be the king-of-all-scripting. Simple reason is that you can't hide from it. Sooner or later you have to use it, more-or-less. But Ruby has it's own reasons for life. In this business, NO ONE THING KILLS ANYTHING, no matter how much people foolishly predict.

If you could use Javascript to develop on the client server AND if Javascript evolved to ECMAScript 4, Javascript would kill every other language on the planet! There are bits of progress here and there (you ~could~ run Rhino on your server to program in Javascript on your server) but Javascript really needs a little more structure to be fun for programming in the large.

The most critical point is stated in the piece, but the significance is missed "Of course, having faster JavaScript on the client still leaves a lot of room for server-side frameworks, and I still think Ruby is well suited for that." JavaScript is your client side language and something else is always your server side language, unless you were the singular classic ASP dude who did ASP scripts in JavaScript. I don't know anybody who did that.

Unless JavaScript gets deployed massively on the server side, it does not have any impact on the status of any server-side language. In short, the title of the piece is off point. JavaScript does not threaten any server side language.

More challanging for Ruby is the existance of good MVC frameworks like Django, TurboGears and ASP.NET MVC. These Frameworks will challange the existance RoR and Ruby.

In my opinion, Django and Python killed Ruby and Rails long time ago.

What do you think of TurboGears? There are some who tell me it is even more advanced than Django. Guido seems to like Django.

But couldn't the strengthening of the JavaScript Community be a weakening of the Ruby Community? I would think that it would attract much of the same crowd.

In a sense it does attract the same crowd, but it can weaken neither. JavaScript attracts everybody who has do anything inside the webpage without a postback. The Ruby guys can't use Ruby inside the browser {future plans for silverlight notwithstanding} so they have to use JavaScript there. By the same token, JavaScript fans can't really use JavaScript server side, so they have to use something else there. These two languages don't compete head-to-head on the same playing field. It's like asking whether the New York Giants will threaten the Yankees. They don't play the same sport on the same field.

All I want for Christmas is an implementation of ECMAScript 4 to run on the JVM. ActionScript3 has proven this to be a nice language. Kind of cross of JavaScript with Java, and a few C# features thrown in to boot. Once one has this on the JVM then will be possible to do end to end web RIA development in a JavaScript-derived language.

Pantuky said it best:

"JS is a client based language" and Ruby is mostly a server based language. The two , so far, are not interchangeable. Although JS is an incredibily rich language to develop in, it remains ugly (at least syntactically) when compared to Ruby.

I do believe, IMHO, that JS is the future in terms of RIA and the client experience with all the speed optimisation research and implementation these days. JS might well be king in the future.

Javascript is usually found in web clients, but that doesn't make it a client-based language.

There are half a dozen Javascript-based server environments out there based on SpiderMonkey, Rhino, and probably soon Tracemonkey and V8. Performance is already pretty good, and JIT compilation can apparently improve that further (except for Rhino which already benefited from being compiled into Java bytecode).