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MS, Mozilla Clashing Over JavaScript Update
jfruhlinger writes "JavaScript has become a crucial part of Websites built on AJAX underpinnings, which makes the upcoming revision to the ECMAScript standard crucial for the future of the Web. But in today's browser environment, no one vendor can impose an update path — which may set things up for a nasty conflict. A fight is being fought on blogs between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, who wants to the new ECMAScript standard to be a radical upgrade, and Chris Wilson, architect of MS's IE team, who would rather keep JavaScript as is and put new functionality into a brand-new language."
Javascript is an ugly, inconsistent (in and of itself as a language let alone the browser differences) beast, and I don't know of too many people who enjoy dealing with it. If you are going to radically change the functionality, why not start from scratch? Leave "Active"xxx and "Java"xxx out of it.
Use something that, by nature, has flexible data types, expandability and clarity built into it. My vote would be for Python, but I'm sure both Mozilla and Microsoft would feel differently. In a perfect world, both sides would quit pretending that JavaScript should anything to do with Java and quit pretending that a HTML scripting language should be a portal to the OS.
Big surprise that Microsoft is pushing proprietary languages over expanding existing open standards.
Why are Microsoft employees even allowed in the room anymore? Oh yea... a large part of the market is already locked into their proprietary os and software api monopoly.
I think Microsoft has a long way to go in order to show they can be play nice with others and actually contribute something. Till then all their employees come with a scarlet M... with the combined weight of years of proprietary vendor lock-in, using their monopoly to extend their monopoly, threatening business practices, etc etc.
It is one thing to sell products that people find useful and innovative and another to sell products that are useful and innovative and which make sure you will lose all your work if ever want to use another product that is useful and innovative.
Actually though, I think adobe is the bigger player in rich web based applications. Their proprietary flash with the mostly proprietary flex (for communication between the server and the flash application) are a big proprietary nut to crack for open standards and open implementations. A combination of javascript and full SVG animation support looks promising, but we are still waiting to see a full firefox implementation.
I shouldn't take it personally. I got modded troll last week for not actually foaming at the mouth about microsoft in a post, I beleive it was about Office not being that bad, not sure, but the gist was that I don't actually mind some of their products I think. you can't win. You can take heart that he almost certainly wrote that post on a windows machine, I am.
I love the fact that so many people who rant about microsoft, or take umbrage at something microsofty are almost always committed windows users who wouldn't know their way round a Bash shell if their life depended on it.
Some of us grown up actually use more than one OS and not be juvenile about it, Currently I use three on a reguler basis. Life/work without my linux cluster would be hard, but so would life without a windows machine (Vista, that's a sack of crap, no matter who wrote it) in the house. God help me, I like windows.
I don't like all their technology takeover things, but I don't use a lot of it. Since I require cross platform functionality with everything I do I have avoided microsoft coding tools and languages, Their mindset as far as developers goes doesn't suit me. I also think Kdevelop sucks and don't use that either. It's not always the vendor I care about, its the product.