I also think the JavaScript language deserves to move forward, and some of the aspects of module systems — particularly, managing imports and exports — would work more smoothly with language support. I don’t foresee an end to the need for external tools for minification, analysis, optimization, repository management, etc. But at the same time, the global object and the various “module patterns” people have to use make it hard to build common ground and avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

On the ECMA standards committee, we’ve been working on a new module system for the next version of JavaScript. Some of our notes on the system are here:

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modules

and we are always happy to discuss them on the es-discuss mailing list:

https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss

I believe the next version of JavaScript could make it significantly easier for people to build, share, and combine libraries in JavaScript. This isn’t meant to take the place of tools like RequireJS or Juicer, but it can alleviate some of the burden from them and build modularity support directly into JavaScript, no batteries required.