While everybody is still crazy about AJAX - how will its future look like? Using it is currently a major PITA, and you’ll most likely have the user download a 200k Javascript file just to make it useable for you as a programming language. JavaScript lacks so much that current programming languages offer out of the box.

This includes especially some comprehensive standard library (Java, C# and Python are all great here), a compact syntax for common data structures (e.g. set operations in Python or stream operations in C++ with <<) and of course: interfaces!

Security restrictions of the browsers - intentional security restrictions to avoid cross site scripting attacks - make interfacing between different javascript applications rather cumbersome, if at all possible. And the only way to have “private” functions in JavaScript is also more of a hack (abusing closures) than a native feature of the language.

What I’d like to see in the next generation of JavaScript - and browsers should start implementing that rather soon, so we’ll be able to use it in some 5 years - are proper interfaces especially for cross-site applications, information hiding, an extensive standard libary, a short syntax for XML processing and common data structures and pretty much all that every javascript toolkit reimplements again and again. Oh, and the result shouldn’t be Java yet, but still an embedded scripting language. ;-)