On 16 January 2012 23:18, David Herman <dher...@mozilla.com> wrote: > > The goal that is missing, and what I believe is the single most important > part of my New Year's email, is: > > 9. Allow programmers to continue thinking of JS as a single cohesive language. > > This is a relative concept rather than an absolute one, but it has real > practical consequences on the overall cognitive complexity of the language. > If you look at the terminology we've been using in TC39 for years, we either > talk about multiple "modes" of JS, or even talk about ES6 as if it's "the new > language." I believe this has been a mistake. Now, we've always agreed that > ES6 must necessarily subsume ES5. And you might claim that this was just > imprecise and casual speech, but I think it betrays a flawed assumption: that > ES6 gives us leeway to make clean breaks with the past. > > [...] > > Instead, we should hew as close as possible to an ideal of One JavaScript, > knowing that we'll never be perfect. But -- I believe -- we can get pretty > darn close.
Thanks for that, I think we are getting to the core of our disagreement. It is kind of funny, because my goal is exactly the same, but from a different perspective. With your proposal, you give the current generation of programmers the illusion that ES6 is a simple extension of ES5. But all future programmers, who grow up with ES6 or beyond, will still have to deal with the legacy of ES5 non-strict mode. There will be two modes to worry about forever after (unless we make another breaking change). Refactoring pitfalls will persist. What I envision makes the transition somewhat more explicit for current programmers (ideally, they need to write at most one extra keyword). But anybody who starts development with ES6+ will never have to care about modes again. For her/him, extended mode is all that's relevant. Refactoring pitfalls only arise during initial version transition. I claim that on the long run, the latter will converge much closer on the ideal of One JavaScript. With your proposal, you are essentially trading perceived simplicity (which, as an aside, is factual complexity) for current JS programmers for increased complexity for all future JS programmers. You make a good point with JS code in HTML attributes, though. I don't have a good answer for that, except falling back to a meta tag. For that specific purpose, that might be fine. /Andreas _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
