Le 10/05/2012 01:46, Axel Rauschmayer a écrit :
I’m seeing quite a bit of anti-TC39 sentiment out there and I don’t think it’s
fair. Some examples (paraphrasing):
- “TC39 doesn’t care about web developers and/or doesn’t understand web
development.”
- “TC39 ignores what the people want and designs ‘by committee’.”
- “TC39 is moving too slowly, does too little.”
The following are counter-points to those opinions:
- If you want to do good design, it is impossible to please everybody. Design
by popular vote is worse than design by committee. That’s why we have
representative democracies.
nit: The metaphor is not good I think. In Athens, people weren't elected
by vote, but randomly chosen. It's debatable, but to some extent, Athens
democracie could be considered as better than any of our current
democraties (assuming they can be called so [1] [2])
- Evolving the language while remaining backward compatible is a hard problem.
I like what TC39 has done so far. The main goal must be to have as clean a
language as possible in the future. Doing so while being backward compatible
means that the transition can be a little messy (several similar constructs
existing in parallel etc.), but that is unavoidable. One doesn’t need to
understand all the gory details as long is things are simple *in practice*.
- TC39 has a lot of responsibility and must keep many parties happy. The
payoff, however, is huge: I’m not aware of any other programming language that
is as open and has as many different, yet highly compatible, implementations.
Hence, moving at a deliberate pace is a good thing. Compare with how much
progress Java has made over the years (in an environment that is much simpler
than JavaScript’s). In that light ES.next’s progress looks quite good.
- I find es-discuss quite open and appreciate it as a resource. I see TC39
members expend a lot of energy and patience in answering as many questions as
possible. Every now and then a question won’t be answered. But that is
understandable, as es-discuss is not a support hotline that has to cover 100%
of the questions.
What could be improved:
- Make it easier to search the mailing list archives. Might be a minor thing,
but it would really help. I wonder how Brendan always finds those old threads
that are relevant to a particular topic.
- Possibly add an FAQ. This could be as simple as collecting all emails that
have long-term explanatory value.
+1. I wish to see es-discuss discussions better documented on the wiki
(or maybe the bug tracker?), but I do acknowledge that it's a lot of
work that TC39 members (who are the only one with an access on the wiki)
don't necessarily have the time to do it.
Also, the proposal page plays this role a bit. By the way, it could be
worth adding "backward compatibility" as a 0th goal as no proposal is
worth considering if it breaks something on the web.
David
[1] http://youtu.be/FCQHlmVN8qQ
[2] (French) http://www.tedxrepubliquesquare.com/etienne-chouard/
[3] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:harmony
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