On Oct 3, 2011, at 9:18 PM, Russell Leggett wrote: > > On the other hand, I'd also hate to see ES4 part 2. >
Having been there I can assure you that the current state of ES.next development is nothing like ES4. The most import difference is that ES4 incorporated core concepts that were still computer science research topics. There are no such research risks in the proposed ES.next features. There is a lot of language design and engineering to be completed, but nothing that truly breaks any new ground that hasn't been tested in other successful languages. The other big difference is that ES4 never really got to the point of having a real specification draft because it never got out of the research stage. The specification work for the ES6 is well underway. By the end of this calendar year many of the new ES.next features will be completely specified in the draft enabling browser builders to start building and interoperable implementation of those features. Sure there is a lot on the table, and eventually we may have to cut some features to make our target dates. But that's just the reality of software engineering. Regarding, incremental updates: A well designed language is a collection of orthogonal features that can be used in powerful combinations to solve problems. The individual features need to be designed to support such composition. In doing such design, often some semantic detail or usage case will move from one feature to another features. When you design and release features in isolation you loose the opportunity for making such trade-off. To make matters worse, each released feature constrains what can be done with future features. It's a bad idea to design language features in isolation. A successful language has too evolve over a multi-decade lifetime. Changes and extensions can't all be accomplished at one tine, so there has to be incremental evolution. However, the sweet spot for language evolution is neither very frequent very small changes nor very seldom very large changes. It's something in the middle. This is the path we are trying to follow in TC39 with ES.next. Allen _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
