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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. I'll wait for... by jfclavette · · Score: 5, Funny

    ECMA Script 3.11 for workgroups.

    The joke works this time !

  2. ES4 not dead by omfgnosis · · 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

  3. Re:Harmony is a good name.... by omfgnosis · · 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.

  4. Crockford and Standards by kevin_conaway · · 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

    He gives some insight into how ES4 got to where it is today and its impact on standards in general

  5. Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ? by maxume · · 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.

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  6. Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ? by boorack · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Maybe. Remembering earlier articles about ES4 and political mess about this, I dunno what to think.

    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 ?