Brendan Eich Discusses the Future of JavaScript 164
snydeq writes "JavaScript creator Brendan Eich talks at length about the future of JavaScript, ARAX, disputes with Microsoft, and the Screaming Monkey scripting engine for IE in an interview with InfoWorld's Paul Krill. JavaScript 2, which Mozilla's Eich expects to be available in some form by the end of the year, will 'address programming in the large.' To do that, Eich hopes to improve the integrity of the language without sacrificing flexibility and making JavaScript 'painfully static in a fixed way like Java does.' Eich does not expect Firefox support for JavaScript 2 until at least Version 3.1 of the browser. As for Internet Explorer, Eich explains how Screaming Monkey will help bring JavaScript 2 to IE should Microsoft drag its heels on providing meaningful support."
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't expect support for Javascript 2 in Firefox until the next version? But I want it to magically appear in the current one!
Javascripts popularity is no real suprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Javascripts popularity is no real suprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Javascript has the potential to be really useful. Well, it already is. I was at JavaONE earlier this year and I went to a few Javascript sessions. One of the most eye-opening sessions was the one where the presenter described Javascript as a LISP-1 language that just happens to look like C.
As far as improvement, I think it needs a proper object oriented model (the current one is far too confusing), and also should be friendlier to implementations that require recursion. You can write recursive code in Javascript now, but it's very slow. Iterative solutions are faster.
Re:Insightful (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:faster math for RSA (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:My $0.02 worth (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you sure you know the difference between the language and the proprietarty APIs the browsers expose to it?
Re:Google Web Toolkit? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that was the long of it.
This is the short:
Now for the medium:
Re:The Point: OO != Classes & imp. inheritance (Score:5, Insightful)
instead exposing the virtual method table directly. (Prototype is nothing else)
Not precisely, since the prototype property also exposes properties, as well as methods. Or, more precisely, methods are properties in javascript, since functions are first-class.
You cannot really design big systems without those two constructs
Not at all true. Well, it's tautologically true. You can't design big systems the way that most programmers who currently work on big systems design them in statically-typed explicitly class-based languages. And by some accounts, this turns out to be a huge advantage, because you get a LoC compression similar to what you'd see with Ruby.
(As for namespaces -- PHP has the same problem, but worse, given that you can't even appropriate static ad-hoc classes as a namespace mechanism. And yet the namespace problem has been more or less practically addressed by conventions, and you can't argue anymore that people aren't building large systems in it.)
different incompatible inheritance constructs by third party libraries
It's true composing "extends" implementation inheritance implementations across libraries is likely to get you in trouble. But then again, simply using implementation inheritance can get you in trouble, in C++, in Java. And having to settle on conventions and libraries is not a fatal hit to a project.
In the end javascript is the classical example of a 95% academic language.
Acadmic? Why? Because it's functional, or didn't start life with "extends"?
Javascript's shown itself as quite practical contender in a huge amount of the heavy lifting that's gone on in the RIA space over the last 5 years, and that's not half what's going to happen as it gets traction elsewhere [blogspot.com].
Re:The Point: OO != Classes & imp. inheritance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Javascripts popularity is no real suprise (Score:3, Insightful)