I doubt that Atari had an IDE that was constantly checking for code trees, pre-compilation analysis, syntax highlighting, etc. I can open up a 1GB text file in Sublime Text and scroll just fine.

Sure, if assembly was trivial to read and understand. Coffeescript is about as nice looking as languages get. Use that. With new code mapping capabilities being released, you could probably get by without really understanding any js.

AMD, CommonJS, requireJS, and many others allow you to write modular js. Take your pick. npm is the major selling point for me on js. None of the dll hell I had on .Net with large projects.

Host your own then. There are some oss google docs replacements out there. Even easier might be an oss dropbox alternative.

Not to mention well written js is insanely fast with V8. On some metrics it can actually beat C with both using their respective standard code idioms (of course, C will always be faster with enough optimisation).

Salesforce seems to be pretty popular, flexible, and powerful from where I am sitting. Our sales team switched over a while back and has not looked back.

Such as? The web has plenty of security holes, but I can think of pretty much zero that are inherent to HTML and that could not also be present in a desktop app connected to the web.

I will become an accountant before I have to go back to using .Net and Visual Studio again. Everything works like a dream... until it doesn't. The Law of Leaky Abstractions was enough to move me to commit to learning a language that did not implicitly require an IDE.

Most of the criticism I see around javascript comes from people who know almost nothing about javascript, much less writing quality javascript. Read "Javascript, the good parts", and js becomes an extremely powerful and flexible language. Trying to cram OOP into a language centered around functional paradigms seems to be the source of most people's issues with the language. As for the DOM... the DOM is a pretty sane system, until you need to support 3+ browsers of differing quality. The language is really not that big of deal anyway. Look at iOS, which uses a language many would say is no where up to snuff with other modern languages.

Pay 20% above the market rate and you will have no problem finding devs. Just saying..

Dr who? (Could not resist)

Thanks for the explanation. Seems to me that an H1B1 could basically never be justified under any circumstances then. If you offered 1 million bucks per year to be a urine tester, people would line up. No job that actually has people working in it already (the programmers in the US exist, they are mostly employed though), could not be filled by offering some level of a higher wage.

What is the bar for this? Obviously, at some price you can always hire someone.

The official name was changed. The implementation in both the software and the marketing materials is extremely slow to catch up though. Source: I work closely with esri on the engineering and business side.

PS: Arcserver is now Arcgis for Server, and Arcgis Online is just called ArcGIS now (they are trying to push the "platform" thing)

Arcmap is the unofficial name for ESRI's flagship product ArcGIS Desktop.