On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Brendan Eich <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Not hermeneutic spirals, just circles. Feels like the last year (we cut > off ES6 proposals, modulo exceptions/tweaks, last May; we had a big-ish > classes strawman synthesized from several prior proposals; we lost Bob > Nystrom to Dart). > I'm still listening and open to helping with classes in JS if I can. I've been quiet lately because I've felt like the consensus (or lack of consensus, if that makes sense) was that people here and on TC39 were moving in the direction of things like |> and other "object combinator" like operators in order to define kinds-of-things instead of a more static-baked-into-the-grammar approach like class syntax. I personally think there's room for both (in much the same way that there's room to have both closures and objects in a language, even though each is the poor-man's other), but the vibe I got from the messages here after the last TC39 meeting was that things weren't gelling with class syntax. It's a deeply hard problem. Most languages I can think of haven't added new large-scale grammar additions like after they've reached maturity (maybe enums in Java are a counter-example?), and the JS community has very strong and divided opinions about classes. Coming up with a class syntax that's rich enough to be worth buying but small enough to not freak the anti-class establishment is tricky. I think it would be really cool to have a single language that gave me classes where that made sense and one-off objects and straight object-delegation where that was a good fit, but I'm more open to kitchen-sink languages than most. A big part of JS's appeal is its minimalism so it's hard to sacrifice that for a feature that some users dislike and won't use. Minimal classes had a good subset of TC39 supporting last summer in > Redmond, but we got hung up future-proofing use-before-initialization for > const and guards, if I recall correctly. The notes from the July meeting > should cover this. That's my recollection too. Seems like a strange hangup given that you can't do that now as far as I understand so not being able to do it in classes either wouldn't be a loss, but I'm not on TC39 so I don't have all of the context and insight here. Either way, I'm still around and up for helping if I can. - bob
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