HN user
He wasn't being convicted of ordering hits on people since there isn't evidence that he was successful in killing anyone; however, I think the justice system operates here on the idea that he could have eventually been successful at ordering a hit, given all the effort he was putting into it.
Everyone seems to be looking at this as some sort of travesty of justice. However, there is significant evidence that he tried to order hits on people. While there's no (public) evidence that he successfully murdered anyone, he clearly had lost his regard for human life.
We're in a day and age where people can cause tremendous harm to others using their mind alone, without throwing a punch or pulling a trigger. Just because he didn't personally cause physical harm to people doesn't mean he can't cause it to happen!
I think it's important for society to be protected from people with his mindset.
It will... - make it easier to use multiple processors - use a new type of DOM designed for web app GUIs which can be translated as necessary back to our current DOM - have built in version checking for its interpreter/JIT - make it easier to manage memory usage - have a module system - be highly specialized towards the web and web app development - eg. built in language components that make communicating with the web server easier - be messy - people will be trying to fix everything anyone thinks is difficult/wrong about Javascript and modern web development - be easier to implement in the browser
For the immediate future, I see Mozilla sticking with ECMAScript and Google sticking with Dart and trying to make it like the language defined above. Google will likely eventually build Dart into normal Chromium and Chrome and build a plugin for Firefox, which nobody will use. Others will build a Dart VM using asm.js to make Dart work efficiently within Firefox. Any successful new browser languages will be able to compile back down to Javascript, although after a while they will be buggy as the Javascript stops getting as much maintenance.
Well, ECMAScript isn't called JavaScript, it's called ECMAScript. So there you go!