I thought Javascript was an ecmascript dialect that was given a similar look/feel to Java in terms of function names, but is otherwise closer to a lisp and smalltalk in how it functions?
Also wasn't Actionscript previously an ecmascript variant?
Also Java is a programming language. You don't have Java on your machine. You have programs written in Java. You have a Java... fuck, virtual machine/runtime/whatever.
Java and C# which is as far as I care a dialect of Java with some of the retard taken out are pretty widespread, industry standard languages. Lots of software is written in them. They function well for the kind of software that IS written in them. This isn't just an issue with web content being written in Java. A lot of desktop applications are written in Java, including Minecraft, which sort of sold massively.
And, yeah, whether you like it or not, you do need more robust programming languages to get more interesting multimedia content into webpages. Java isn't somehow more issue-prone than Flash or HTML5.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-usa-java-securitybre90b0ex-20130112,0,5437237.story This article explains it better. It's attacked a lot because it's widely used. All software has security holes. You can break anything if you try hard enough.
Also it sounds like hackers are exploiting security flaws in the webpages themselves, and not just Java.
Best quote from the news article's comments:
"Maybe we should have stuck with Visual Basic -- remember all of the Java-related lawsuits against Microsoft?"
People don't use Visual Basic because it's shitty and it's outright not at all efficient enough for anything that has to be high performance. It's also got more security issues than Java afaik, but nobody targets them because nothing written in VB is likely to be useful enough to bother hacking.
I know this because I test software that's written in VB.NET and it breaks in the most deliciously beautiful ways.
Seriously though, let people hack my laptop. They'll just find a bunch of Steam games, my Carnage Hearts isos (shit's antique and the actual discs go into storage, yo), and a whole lot of furry porn.