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ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead

Posted by Soulskill on from the long-live-ecmascript dept.

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?"

6 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Harmony is a good name.... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    What is needed in the JavaScript world is not more features, but more consistency of implementation across the various browsers.
    .

    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.

    1. Re:Harmony is a good name.... by Goyuix · · Score: 4, 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.

    2. Re:Harmony is a good name.... by hedwards · · Score: 4, 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.

    3. Re:Harmony is a good name.... by pembo13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would ask for a safe JSON parser as well as I prefer JSON to XML (which is quickly becoming overused)

      --
      "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
  2. A real pity by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ES4, as proposed, was destined to become a truly beautiful language, applicable for far more than its present Web scripting role. It was something I was actually looking forward to. And now - they've essentially codified the status of ES as the "Web scripting language", and discarded all the "too hard" stuff from the spec because it didn't fit the role. Which is quite surprising, since, given the popularity of GWT, one would think that ES3 implementations do lack something that people want.

    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.

  3. Re:ES4 not dead by rycamor · · Score: 4, 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.