ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead 168
TopSpin writes "Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language, has announced that ECMA Technical Committee 39 has abandoned the proposed ECMAScript 4.0 language specification in favor of a more limited specification dubbed 'Harmony,' or ECMAScript 3.1. A split has existed among the members of this committee, including Adobe and Microsoft, regarding the future of what most of us know as JavaScript. Adobe had been promulgating their ActionScript 3 language as the next ECMAScript 4.0 proposal. As some point out, the split that has prevented this may be the result of Microsoft's interests. What does the future hold for Mozilla's Tamarin Project, based on Adobe's open source ActionScript virtual machine?"
I'll wait for... (Score:5, Funny)
ECMA Script 3.11 for workgroups.
The joke works this time !
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Dude, that joke is so 1993!
The current version is going from 4.0 to 3.5.9
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Microsoft stuff in the summary is just trolling. Mozilla and Google are both on board with abandoning the current work called ES4.
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ? (Score:5, Interesting)
My opinion: I need a modern virtual machine with capabilities comparable with Flash/Silverlight applets and level of integration comparable with javascript engines shipped with browsers. Compatible across browsers. Language independent (I would like to program this in Python) - maybe with some kind of intermediate representation (bytecode?). Capable to run bigger, non-trivial apps. Well designed. Open sourced and not patent encumbered.
Currently there is nothing satisfying my wishes. Pure javascript has somewhat limited capabilities (especially in multimedia area) and isn't fully compatible across browsers. Flash is proprietary and doesn't work well on some platforms and is just an applet (not well integrated with the browser itself). Silverlight is proprietary and does not work well outside windows. Java applets - along with their bad integration with browser itself and huge startup overhead - are IMO examples of bad design. Any ideas ?
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No, no ideas, but ES4 was only going to give you about 1/10 of what you want anyway, so you don't lose all that much here.
it's the libraries and frameworks (Score:3, Insightful)
Any ideas ?
The problem with Java and the CLR in browsers are mostly with the libraries, not the virtual machines. So, I think the thing to do would be to start with, say, the CLR and develop an open applet environment and browser integration based on it. This environment could even be emulated in Silverlight, allowing things to run without any install on Windows.
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This environment could even be emulated in Silverlight, allowing things to run without any install on Windows.
Doesn't the CLR (as part of the .Net Framework) ship with Windows as of Vista?
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http://www.sproutcore.com/ [sproutcore.com]
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I haven't looked into SproutCore much, but isn't it just a framework built around JavaScript? If that's the case, how does that solve the multimedia part of the GP's request?
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I don't see anything about multimedia? I don't know what needs he/she had but I guess animated SVG and video directly in the browser solves some issues.
Personally I hate flash and kind of all flash apps so..
As long as no one listen to Adobe I'm quite happy, very obvious that they want it as standard since I guess it's what flash uses, but then people would probably make more flash apps which require their plugin bullshit and well, no thanks.
Build on top of something open and make it work everywhere without
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What does the zillionth javascript framework have to do with his (legitimate) request?
Besides sproutcore looks less than impressive, even by javascript metrics. It took ages to load, yet the few available widgets feel sluggish under linux. Oh and ofcourse the layout blows up when changing font-size...
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Yes, sproutcore, because mobileMe is such a success.
While there were issues accessing the web interface I think those were the result of back-end problems or server overload. I don't believe the problems they experienced initially were actually inherent to the sproutcore-based webapps.
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I have an idea. I'm working on it.
My initial idea I laid out here [screamingduck.com]
Since writing that I became aware of quite a few things also exploring this area. I'm currently putting together a proof-of-concept plugin using vx32 [wikipedia.org].
It should be possible to make something speedily executable on non-x86 with just a few restrictions and a bit of instruction-metadata.
Importantly. The spec is much simpler than any existing VM model so an open spec with multiple implementation methods should be quite feasible.
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> My opinion: I need a modern virtual machine ==> Java ... check
> with capabilities comparable with Flash/Silverlight applets ==> Java ... check
> and level of integration comparable with javascript engines shipped with browsers. ==> Java ... check
> Compatible across browsers. ==> Java ... check
> maybe with some kind of intermediate representation (bytecode?). ==> Java ... check
> Capable to run bigger, non-trivial apps. ==> Java ... check
> Open sourced and not patent
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Errrr uhmmm, ever heard of Java?
Have you ever heard about Haxe ?
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Mozilla and Google are both on board with abandoning the current work called ES4.
In particular a very curious choice on Google's part, whose GWT implements Java on browsers.
The current decision is that we don't need ES4 as we don't need packages, namespaces, classes, early binding and types on a web language.
Makes you wonder how GWT happened then.
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I think their primary roles would have been for basic libraries, for generated code such as SOAP bindings, and other code that ordinary web-developers would not write. They would work quite well for that and allow better robustness and possibly better performance (less dynamism -> more JIT compiler optimizations) for core functionality like parsing XML and drawing graphics.
The only way I can imagine that those features are "unsound for the Web" is that ordinary web developers would not bother to underst
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less dynamism -> more JIT compiler optimizations
Not entirely true. Less dynamism means more static compiler optimisations. It can lead to more JIT optimisations, although those optimisations are often a lot more complicated. (And, yes, I do do research in dynamic language optimisation).
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I'm tempted to disagree with you, but given your qualifications (and my lack thereof) perhaps I'd better phrase it as a question. If we're just talking about a browser language for the next five to ten years, won't static code be much faster than dynamic code for most if not all of that time? It took Sun years to make Java fast, and it seems like optimizing Javascript would require much more sophisticated techniques that would take even longer to reach users. I'd be very happy to hear I'm wrong, though,
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The current approach in the Sun JVM actually discards a lot of the static information and uses techniques like type inference to get it back. One t
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>The Microsoft stuff in the summary is just trolling
That is true because MS actually voted for more security of an individual's IP rights than what ECMAScript 4.0 offered. One problem for example, under ES4, is that containers of code may also contain code that is owned by someone that never gave permission to distribute code. ES3.1 is not a solution, but it achieves that some desired advancements without a greater lack of security in a trade-off.
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isn't that how .dlls have worked for years. Pretty much any dll can call any other one. Isn't that the basis of how things like scrip-o-licous and prototype work, allowing your pages to bind into the common javascript. Javascript is a DOCUMENT scripting language, not designed to keep the user or user agent from knowing or reusing the code.
Microsoft and Adobe are not being genuine here... the only way to implement what they want is in complied languages... like .net or Flash... gee imagine that.
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Slashdot: News for Trolls. Memes that Matter.
ES4 not dead (Score:5, Informative)
It's not dead. There will eventually be a Fourth Edition of ECMAScript, it just isn't the focus now. The ES4 proposal wasn't ever enshrined as the actual Fourth Edition either.
I was really skeptical about the concessions made by the ES4 side before I listened to some of their rationale; it wasn't so much concessions to the 3.1 side, it was that the things they were dropping didn't adequately solve the problems they were put in to solve.
There's a great talk about it here: http://openwebpodcast.com/episode-2-brendan-eich-and-arun-ranganathan-on-ecmascript-harmony [openwebpodcast.com]
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And it wants to go for a walk.
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And notice that the adoption of scripting of web pages are slow in order to allow the web pages to be useful even on older browsers.
Most of the functionality in JavaScript 1.5 is sufficient for what you normally want to do.
The only problem is that JavaScript/ECMAScript from a language point of view isn't really good. A strongly statically typed script language would have been better since it would have allowed the developers to catch a lot of bugs that now occasionally blows up in the face of the users.
Re:ES4 not dead (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem is that JavaScript/ECMAScript from a language point of view isn't really good. A strongly statically typed script language would have been better since it would have allowed the developers to catch a lot of bugs that now occasionally blows up in the face of the users.
That would be the worst possible thing to happen to Javascript. I know, I know... let's not get into a religious war over static/dynamic typing. There are valid points for each in different contexts, but a language in Javascript's problem domain is probably one of the worst contexts for static typing.
Keeping the language small, clean and simple should be the priorities. If you want Java in the browser, well... that's already available.
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Reality is that you when designing an application on an enterprise-scale level have to consider that not every user is running the latest browser.
I know that for a fact, and that also means that if you don't care about users running IE5.0 or whatnot then you will get toasted by bug reports.
This is especially true when it comes to governmental organizations as end users. I wouldn't be all surprised to find NT4 clients out in the wild still.
and Harmony is not ES3.1! (Score:2)
Original post says
That is wrong, ES3.1 is the smaller increment and repair of the current third standard, and "Harmony" is new features beyond that. Doug Crockford, who seemed opposed to much of ES4, wrote:
Some of the features that were in ES4 were reasonable, so a new project, called Harmony, is starting which will look at adapting the best of ES4 on top of
Harmony is a good name.... (Score:5, Insightful)
.
It is good to see the standards committee taking a breather from major new features, and instead focusing upon the alignment of behavior of functionality across the various browsers.
Hopefully, there will be a robust and rigorous compliance test suite as a deliverable of this standards process.
Re:Harmony is a good name.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would disagree (to some degree) that more features are in fact needed. For example, E4X (and a native XML doc object) being standardized in the browsers would be a huge benefit.
That being said, I think that a lot of the feature bloat going into the proposed v4 was really not all that great. I think this is generally a step in the right direction.
Re:Harmony is a good name.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite so, a lack of standardization amongst the implementations has been a serious problem for years. Allowing developers to use the entire spec as is without fear of problems going between browsers would be a huge step forward for JavaScript.
Perhaps add in a few fixes for annoying parts of the language and similar, but overall if it's just made to be consistent across browsers, that would go a long ways.
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YES! But the next revision...
1) They NEED to release a long list of test cases that can be run against implementations.
2) How about having toString() output JSON? (at least specify exactly what it should output.)
If anything new:
Access methods for Object():
Allows a function to monitor read/write/exec of an object's properties (EXTREMELY useful for client side patching of implementation bugs.)
A Console object loosely modeled after FireBug with a focus on unit testing. Implementation optional; b
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toString:
OK. I didn't read revision 3. toString() is not useful IMHO; JSON would be more intuitive in that it would output source code like strings- serialized. Add serialize() if toString is so important to keep (who uses it??)
Property Monitoring:
It is not a big speed issue. Mozilla ALREADY adds something very similar to property monitoring. see "__defineGetter"
Console Object:
Javascript exists outside of DOM more so every year. Built in testing (+ unit testing) + debug options (assert, log...) would make i
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note: ECMAScript 2 was the last one I read.
I just assumed they'd add function and regexp to the JSON (so it wouldn't be exactly JSON; however, RegExp in JSON would be nice.)
Console Object:
No, implementations would not have to support Console, just be required to ignore the use of it. Detailed specifics of debug output do not need to be specified; just the JS interface to Console.
Classes and inheritance:
JS functions well enough without class trees and heavy type conversion. I don't want a typeless Java. (How
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I meant properties in an instance of Object that are used instead of the inherited properties; which is how it should work everywhere at this point (but like I said I am not wanting to test everything when I just learned avoid the issue all this time.)
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Next time I'll try it without workarounds and see how it comes out. thanx for testing it for me.
I've been doing js since before ecma; which means i am in the habit of working around "supported" features. I don't get back to them all to test them
Re:Harmony is a good name.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd vote for a decent JSON parser for AS that doesn't step through every character one by one to parse the data...(like the one on the JSON page) but that's just a minor gripe of mine.
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RegExp & eval == WIN
Re:Harmony is a good name.... (Score:5, Informative)
"What is needed in the JavaScript world is not more features, but more consistency of implementation across the various browsers."
With the exception of a few later-added methods (on Array for example), that's already there. The inconsistency is in the DOM, and that's not something ECMA covers.
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Most implementations of JavaScript allow an extra comma at the end of a list. It's very handy when you've got a long list of stuff that you're rearranging periodically. But once you've finished development and everything works... then you discover that in some browsers, your page doesn't work, because in those browsers, an extra comma at the end of a list is illegal.
I think Internet Explorer and Opera were the two I had trouble with, while Firefox and Safari worked fine.
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Well to be fair, and I don't remember which browsers Implement which, but the extra comma is currently invalid.
Yes, but you said "that's already there" referring to consistency across browsers. The situation is vastly better, but we're not out of the woods yet - JavaScript itself doesn't behave the same way across multiple browsers that are currently in common use (partly because there are some older browsers that are still being used).
On top of that, we have serious inconsistencies in the DOM - things like, if you put a TR inside a TABLE, Internet Explorer will silently insert a TBODY for you (because surely that
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Stds compliance good for all except lg monopolies (Score:2)
> What is needed in the JavaScript world is not more
> features, but more consistency of implementation
> across the various browsers.
While I agree with you about the need for greater consistency of implementation, I don't expect that will ever happen. Microsoft does not want that to happen; and will do all it can to prevent cross-platform and cross-browser adherence to agreed standards where those standards will reduce its monopoly position - even to the extent of hijacking standardisation processes
I'm skeptical (Score:3, Funny)
Crockford and Standards (Score:5, Informative)
I invite everyone to read Douglas Crockford's latest post on the YUI blog entitled: The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization [yuiblog.com]
He gives some insight into how ES4 got to where it is today and its impact on standards in general
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This was the sentence of Crockford's post that really leapt out at me:
That's generally true of standards committees. When they're documenting existing practices and seeking consensus and convergence between them, they're in their element. When they decide they can start inventing, rather than consolidating, they lose the plot altogether...
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That line was about HTML5, which is absolutely ridiculous. The things that the WHATWG and W3C have added to the HTML5 proposal are one or both of the following:
- formalized semantics already informally in use as classes and ids (like the section and nav tags);
- behaviors already in use, drastically simplified (like Web Forms 2.0).
They didn't really "just make new stuff up", they're making the language and environment much more powerful, with real world use in mind. Both types of feature additions make devel
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If you disagree with Crockford's opinions, the appropriate person to argue with is Crockford. I pulled out a quote to make a general point, one with which Crockford might not even agree, yet you don't seem to be too interested in talking to me.
Rest assured, the feeling is mutual.
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Yeah, but you weren't discussing anything with me. I could tell that by the lack of reference to the point I was making. You were beating me over the head with your disagreement with Douglas Crockford's assessment of the HTML 5 committee. I'm not interested, sorry.
Besides, what on earth makes you think I do not see you as a specific individual? I only said I didn't want you to discuss something with me. Have more self-esteem. Believe that you stand out from the crowd. Free your inner snowflake!
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Yeah, 'cause you clearly are incapable of stepping back from the keyboard yourself.
Anyway, it now becomes clear that somewhere along the line you misunderstood me, as you demonstrate here:
I expressed no such agreement, save that I thought a particular comment he made about a specific circumstance - whether he was right or wrong to apply it to that circumstance - was generally applicable.
Do you want to have the last word now?
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Please allow me to mediate as a third party: You're being a whiny bitch. If you're going to point to an article as a shiny example everybody should look at, then certainly the surrounding context is fair game for discussion.
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I didn't point to the article. The person I first replied to did that. I just read it, and saw a line I agreed with generally, without much thought to its specific context.
If you're going to try to force your way into a mediatory position, it does help an awful lot to make sure you get your facts straight first.
(But then, the whole point of mediation is not taking sides, so it's good to see you drank the whole cup of fail this morning.)
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I didn't point to the article. The person I first replied to did that. I just read it, and saw a line I agreed with generally, without much thought to its specific context.
It's a minor technicality. The fact is you're still being extremely oversensitive because somebody replied with context about a particular line you found insightful. It's a discussion on a public forum. It wasn't a personal attack on you -- get over it.
ECMAscript 4.0 is dead (Score:2)
Long live ECMAscript 5.0!
What a damn shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Such a damn shame to let ECMAScript edition 4 go in this way.
The small shame is for Adobe's efforts, who entered the ECMA standards body to contribute, donated the entire engine to Mozilla and plenty of other efforts to get this going. But AS3/Flash will not be affected in a big way from this.
The web community as a whole will be. That's where the big shame is: for all of us, web developers. I see that packages, namespaces, classes and early binding are out, likely forever.
Classes are not "sugar", we do need those paradigms when creating bigger applications, because they are more rigid, more readable, more maintainable, understandable. I love lambdas, prototypes and all that, but that's the lower level, the implementation inside a class, inside a package. Those are not interchangable paradigms.
ES4 and AS3 have managed to add those higher constructs to the language, while maintaining full compatibility with all flexible features of ES3 (the JavaScript currently used in browsers).
The reasoning behind dropping all constructs appears to be the preconceived notion that JavaScript must exist in the form of disparate text files loosely connected to each other, something that doesn't scale to bigger efforts at all (and which makes Flash much more viable for such deployment), hence packages and early binding are out. What a mistake.
Who's to say we won't see JAR-like environment where bigger libraries can be compressed together, and some preprocessing can be done to ease the load on the client CPU/bandwidth? I've been praying we get such deployment option soon as a modern web application typically has to download a ton of CSS/JS/image files to build an average GUI nowadays. Why isn't this the focus of ECMA's efforts, but instead the focus is to maintain the status quo and reject us basics that have proven themselves in time to work well in all environments out there.
If you doubt this would work, look no further than Java/Flash applets distributed over the web in this fashion (and Flash is very widely used nowadays).
What ECMA has achieved with their decision, is to basically stagnate the browser environment, and empower third-party cross-browser plugins to eat more from the advanced web application market share, because Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight are not even thinking of dropping their mature OOP features, just because ECMA said we don't need them.
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With a good build/deployment script you can combine all of your CSS and JS files together, giving the advantage of better compression and less HTTP requests. If you have it set up in that way, you can split your script into as many files as you want.
Images are a bit different, you can't do much outside of spriting where you can.
This is not to say a JAR equivalent wouldn't be preferred, just that there are things you can do today.
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You could actually incorporate a sprite building tool into a build/deployment script.
That would be a very nice addition to any JS UI toolkit.
It would take all the images (assuming they are of the same type...PNG gets my vote) and put them into a large image sprite... while adjusting all CSS and JS to use the new image.
Not an easy task i think... but interesting from an optimization POV anyways.
Just another example (Score:2)
Not that we need another example. How many have we had already? Does anybody doubt?
Classes are not out of the question. (Score:3, Informative)
Classes are syntatic sugar. That's what the working group found, when it discovered that most class-centric features can be boiled down to simpler APIs such as .freeze(), .defineProperty(), &c., all of which are being implemented in ES3.1. Classes, then, would only be user interface to what can already be implemented using these features.
ES-Harmony is about standardizing new features that already work in (three out of four) major browsers, without changing the syntax of the language. Brendan Eich of Moz
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Seriously, RTFA.
This thread's title is totally misleading. In fact, the summary is wrong. ES Harmony is NOT ES3.1. And of course, there's the anti-MS slant as usual, but no mention of Yahoo, which was also against ES4. Good ol' /.
So just in case you're too lazy to read the article, here's a quick summary:
ES Harmony is just an ES4 that the ES 3.1 guys agreed to work on after ES3.1 is out the door, while the ES4 guys agreed to work together with the ES3.1 guys on ES3.1. So ES Harmony (which could be ES4 o
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I've played around a bit with AS3, and what I've found so far are a lot more annoyances than any useful additions. More importantly, it is not compatible with JS 1.5. In my experience so far, classes are only really "necessary" in so far as people whose first experience with OOP was C++/Java/C# don't seem to be willing to learn anything else. I've worked on many large projects written in JavaScript, and while there are a lot of annoyances that appear in JavaScript in large applications, all of them are e
for those of you who complain, (Score:1)
as i do, about all the different dhtml and javascript implementations across different browsers, be very scared
here is a vision of the future where different browsers use different script languages
its as if internet explorer never decided to support javascript in the mid1990s but still gained massive market share, forcing us in the industry to code for sites in javascript and vbscript
(shudder)
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and this should not surprise anyone. Cross platform technologies are a threat to Windows and since over 80% of Microsofts profits come from Windows, cross platform technologies are a threat to them. So don't wonder why Microsoft keeps pushing stuff which only works on Windows or pushes for things which slow down adaption for open standards.
LoB
A real pity (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well; Microsoft scores one here, considering that Silverlight 2.0 will be scriptable using Python and Ruby out of the box.
By the way, the whole fuss about MS being behind this is pretty stupid and unfounded. MS was actually one to jump on the ES4 bandwagon early, along with Adobe - their early implementation of it was called JScript.NET, first released in 2002 with .NET Framework 1.0, and it does in fact still ship with all versions of .NET, and is an officially supported .NET language. They certainly wouldn't have any trouble extending it to the more recent spec, should it become standard. Now, I guess it will just be quietly dropped in the next version of the framework.
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I agree that packages are not generally useful for the web, but why not keep it as a language feature. Mandate that a parser accept it, but perhaps only mandate that core packages be supported, and that an implementation does not need to provide a means to add additional packages.
I really don't understand the AS 3.0's "namespace" feature. That looks like access specifiers to me.
The packages feature sounds more like C++'s namespaces to me. (Although C++ classes are also (effectively) namespaces, to the point
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JS was never "lightweight" in any sense of the word - neither in terms of language features, nor it terms of performance of typical implementations. If you want a truly lightweight scripting language, designed as such, see Lua.
Why is JavaScript is so popular? Lamda Functions (Score:2)
Although JavaScript is not very good as an application language, it can do some really neat things which makes it very interesting to language nerds which is why it is so popular.
One thing is that functions are also objects which means they can be returned and taken as parameters by other functions. This is called lambda coding. Function pointers do not allow you do to quite the same thing since they can't be dynamically generated and modified. It makes certain kinds of mathematical programming very easy
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JavaScript is popular only because it exists in almost every browser since a long time ago. This means that if you code something for a browser in JavaScript you know that it has a reasonable chance to work for the most commonly used browsers.
The use of JavaScript outside the environment of browsers is very limited, and exists only in specialized applications where it may be useful to have a script language. But then it competes with other script languages like TCL/Tk.
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In my case, I really didn't START to like Javascript until I began to read up on it's functional capabilities.
I think there is more to Javascript's popularity than what you say. It is actually a fairly nice little language, and hopefully when a few annoyances are cleaned up in version 2.0 it will be used outside the browser more and more. In fact, anyone who has done some serious Mozilla application programming with XUL realizes that there is no reason Javascript must be restrained to a web browser context
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Re:Why is JavaScript is so popular? Lamda Function (Score:2)
I think you are confusing a few things. Lambda calculus is a simple universal model of computing invented by Church. A lambda expression can reference variables explicitly inside its scope ('bound') or outside ('unbound'). By performing a beta reduction, you explicitly bind a variable in a lambda expression. This is what the lambda operation in Lisp does.
It sounds like you are confusing the fact that functions are objects, and the fact that functions are closures. The fact that they are objects lets
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I think I get what you're saying but the difference between function having closures and functions being objects, but I just intended to point out that unlike JavaScript, Java, C, and C++ don't allow first class functions (which I refer to as lambda functions) though they do allow first class objects and function pointers though
First class functions and Lambda functions in Lamda calculus are the same thing. I also used the calculation of a derivative using a lambda function as an example which is something
JavaFx (Score:2)
Haxe (Score:2)
I'd love to see Haxe ( http://www.haxe.org/ [haxe.org] ) supersede Ecmascript.
schmecmascript (Score:2)
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Why? There's consensus on Harmony.
Re:Can I just point out (Score:5, Interesting)
[Can I just point out] That Javascript as a development platform, as it seems to have become, is evil. It's just horrible from an efficiency, performance, security and architectural point of view. It seems to be the future.
You can point that out, but you'd be wrong. JavaScript hasn't recently "become" anything. The last major revision that all browsers supported was in November 2000.
It is a beautiful, expressive and quite powerful language that is just now starting to shine after years of being misunderstood by people like you.
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Re:Can I just point out (Score:5, Interesting)
OOP !== Class based OOP
JS isn't a class based OOP language, it's prototype based OOP language - the two are _very_ different. I can understand why it's a pain in the neck. It's also a pain in the neck to force a square peg into a round hole, but is the blame on the person who made the square peg or on the person whom thinks that the square peg should indeed be able to be put in the round hole?
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Why classes? Are they inherently superior to other approaches?
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Perhaps you'd like to read my post again.
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You can point that out, but you'd be wrong. JavaScript hasn't recently "become" anything. The last major revision that all browsers supported was in November 2000.
Try reading the OP's post with some thought. He isn't saying that Javascript has changed, rather it has become the development platform for Web 2.0.
As for beauty, well, there's lot less ways to do method dispatching using immutable arrays than mutable hashmaps. Simplicity and transparency are closely linked with beauty as well.
Not quite... (Score:2)
Having stated that, it is also true that if you want smooth cross-browser compliance, Flash with actionscript has been the only way to go for quite a while. And given that, then Microsoft might just have shot itself in the foot again, because Flash and actionscript are more consistent cross-browser than JavaScript has
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I agree that JavaScript/ECMAScript is horrible, but it's what we have.
At least it's not as horrible as VBScript.
But I sure would like to have had a language with strong static typing, which in effect would have made it very similar to Java. By doing this we would have had at least some bugs straightened out before deploying to a large number of users.
The inconsistency between browsers is also a catch, but it could have been a lot worse.
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exactly what Microsoft is doing its best work to cause. Javascript and all the tech in AJAX which allows application-like browser-neutral pages is a massive threat to Microsoft's income.
I don't know what Microsoft had to do with this but their position on any industry committee is purely to find ways to either stall the project or make sure they have ways to dilute it on Windows. They have no other reason or purpose. IMO.
LoB
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ok, so you are saying that they produced "HTTPRequest object" with the W3C? I doubt that and would figure it was probably originally tied to some Windows-only technology. Even if in the far off chance they did submit this to the W3C, I'd bet that they would take it off the market in a heartbeat if they could.
And I don't doubt they have some good developers. They, as a business, don't put solutions or customers first so that their shareholders are rewarded. They know their shareholders are rewarded only beca
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Yes, what suckage. Who on earth wants a simple, dynamic, low-cruft language with first-class functions, closures, lambdas and a prototype object system that still manages to look like the C language family? Evil, evil, evil...
Note: I don't consider myself enough of a language expert to judge your first assertion, but your second assertion makes me strongly suspect the first. That you would claim Brendan Eich has no business being associated with language design doesn't exactly help your case.
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Who on earth wants a simple, dynamic, low-cruft language with first-class functions, closures, lambdas and a prototype object system
Hardly anyone, it seems. Otherwise, how do you account for the popularity of C++?
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Yes, what suckage. Who on earth wants a simple, dynamic, low-cruft language with first-class functions, closures, lambdas and a prototype object system that still manages to look like the C language family? Evil, evil, evil...
There have been dozens of such languages around. The hard part is also making it (1) fast, and (2) correct. And JavaScript is neither.
A Security Disaster Waiting to Happen (Score:2)
> The web browser needs to transform into a sand-boxed window manager.
> How is that again? A window manger, huh?
Every time you add power to a scripting language, you invite abuse. Considering how well MS has *NOT* sandboxed stuff inside IE, absolutely the *LAST* thing the web wants/needs is "more powerful" web apps.
The article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15/webbased_clipboard_hijacking/ [theregister.co.uk] describes the latest Flash exploit. It appears to come in via Flash in 3rd-party banner ads. It causes
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Thanks for the reply...
I think many have missed the point entirely. I in NO way advocate allowing anyone to run ANY code they want to fling onto my machine.
What I advocate is a more cohesive way ( and ultimately simpler ) way of doing what we are trying to do today with even more security.
In my example to pop open a new web page the page will deliver text but in the form of a script that can call options built into the browser. This happens now in the form of and all of this stuff has to either be contro
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> I think many have missed the point entirely. I in NO way advocate
> allowing anyone to run ANY code they want to fling onto my machine.
I mis-interpreted your statement "The web browser needs to transform into a sand-boxed window manager. How is that again? A window manger, huh? The idea sits in front of ALL of you every day. The GUI desktop moves things around, arranges windows, covers them up allows them to be moved, adjusts for sizing, everything we desperately try to implement in CSS and DOM but p
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Please, people, do believe in standards, this is the only way to go next stage.
I believe in standards like I believe in Santa Claus.