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ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead
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?"
The Microsoft stuff in the summary is just trolling. Mozilla and Google are both on board with abandoning the current work called ES4.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
[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.
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 ?
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?