{"id":833,"date":"2008-08-15T10:52:53","date_gmt":"2008-08-15T09:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/833-ecmascript-4-deemed-unsound-for-the-web.html"},"modified":"2008-08-15T10:52:53","modified_gmt":"2008-08-15T09:52:53","slug":"ecmascript-4-deemed-unsound-for-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/833-ecmascript-4-deemed-unsound-for-the-web.html","title":{"rendered":"Parts of EcmaScript 4 deemed unsound for the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was the conclusion of an EcmaScript meeting in Oslo last month. Specifically, as Brendan Eich explains<\/a>, three features – packages, namespaces and early binding \u2013 were considered too heavyweight<\/strike> unsuitable for a browser scripting language. Here is Eich\u2019s \u201cExecutive summary\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

The committee has resolved in favor of these tasks and conclusions: <\/p>\n

1. Focus work on ES3.1 with full collaboration of all parties, and target two interoperable implementations by early next year. <\/p>\n

2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both semantic and syntactic innovation. <\/p>\n

3. Some ES4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This conclusion is key to Harmony. <\/p>\n

4. Other goals and ideas from ES4 are being rephrased to keep consensus in the committee; these include a notion of classes based on existing ES3 concepts combined with proposed ES3.1 extensions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This means that the evolution of JavaScript is now on a new path, focused for now on a more modest enhancement to the language called EcmaScript 3.1.<\/p>\n

Given how loudly Eich protested about EcmaScript 3.1 last October<\/a>, it is a surprising turn of events. Was Eich convinced by the arguments of Microsoft and Yahoo in support of a more lightweight JavaScript?<\/p>\n

What this means is that JavaScript 2.0 won\u2019t happen as previously envisaged. John Resig<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

… you can forget a lot of what you learned about ECMAScript 4, previously. Many of the complicated concepts contained in the language have been tossed. Instead there is a considerable amount of effort going in to making sure that new features will be easily duplicable through other means.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Eich and Resig are keen to stress that JavaScript will still be a highly capable language. Still, the obvious conclusion is that this will be good for plug-ins which support more powerful languages: Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Sun Java or Java\/FX. Personally I\u2019m disappointed.<\/p>\n

It is also presenting Adobe with a tricky problem, as it implemented much of an earlier specification for EcmaScript 4 in ActionScript 3. Rather than being a standard language, as Adobe had planned, it looks like this will now be more of an Adobe language. I doubt this will have much practical impact on developers.<\/p>\n

PS Brendan Eich has commented below<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: ecmascript<\/a>, javascript<\/a>, brendan eich<\/a>, john resig<\/a>, microsoft<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was the conclusion of an EcmaScript meeting in Oslo last month. Specifically, as Brendan Eich explains, three features – packages, namespaces and early binding \u2013 were considered too heavyweight unsuitable for a browser scripting language. Here is Eich\u2019s \u201cExecutive summary\u201d: The committee has resolved in favor of these tasks and conclusions: 1. Focus work … Continue reading Parts of EcmaScript 4 deemed unsound for the Web<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,34,44,49,77,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net","category-adobe","category-flash","category-internet","category-java","category-silverlight","category-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}