On May 10, 2012, at May 10, 20121:41 AM, David Bruant wrote: > Le 10/05/2012 04:44, Mikeal Rogers a écrit : >> The core problem is that people who work nearly full time on designing a >> language are necessarily out of touch with people using it, and the people >> using it are ill equipped to balance the priorities all all the parties >> involved in designing it. > I understand your point, but I'm afraid I disagree with your vision which I > think is too simplistic. Dave Herman's task.js is a library that has been > suggested on the JSFixed thread about asynchronisity [1]. Dave Herman is part > of TC39 and what he did seems to resonate well in the developer community. > It seems like you're opposing people who design the English language and > people who use the English language. The world is not that dichotomic. People > who used ECMAScript 3 felt the lack of .bind. People who design the language > added it in ECMAScript 5. > >> I think a better strategy is for TC-39 to state definitively what is *not* >> currently working on or is of a very low priority. This would allow the >> community of people using JavaScript to tackle those problems more directly >> rather than just waiting. At some point in the future TC-39 can adopt or >> ratify behavior that has proved itself in the community. I know this process >> is eluded to often but I don't think you understand how much momentum gets >> sucked out of the community when they are under the impression that new >> behavior will be handed down from TC-39 and that their work may fall in >> conflict or out of date. >> >> The recent discussion about Object.isObject is a great example. If this >> isn't happening please state so definitely so that we can rally around >> existing work (underscore) or build something new. > This point is interesting. Among the changes that TC39 have to make to the > language, I see 2 categories. One is adding new language capabilities > (WeakMap, proxies, lexical |this| functions, binary types, proto operator, > etc.) the other is new built-in functions (for Array, Math, Object, etc.). > Maybe the latter category could be "(partially) delegated" to the developer > community and ratified by TC39. > I foresee that with modules, a new field for this second category is opening > and there will have some important discussion about what module should be in > the standard and which shouldn't. Maybe the responsibility for this part > could be also shared with the developer community since they are those who > usually write these functions (out of need).
There is a difference to TC-39 but not much of a different to the community. The web developer motto is "suck it up", if something is broken we write a workaround or monkey patch it, If something is impossible to do one way we find another way. People in the community don't ask for "WeakMap" until there is a proposal. Instead they come up with other crazy ways to accomplish their end goals without needing such a type to varying degrees success (we're still finding leaks in FreeList in node.js http.js that might have been prevented had we had WeakMap a few years ago). > >> It might be beneficial to invite a few people from the developer community >> to meetings and to rotate them out so that no one becomes truly intrenched >> in the process. > Or that the developer community decide to gather by itself and then share > feedback on es-discuss. That's hard. JavaScript is a diverse community which also means that it is fragmented. I think the node.js community has a good core group of leadership with somewhat consistent ideas about what the community wants from the language. There are leaders in the web developer community that I believe could speak well to their supporters (Jeremy Ashkenas, Thomas Fuchs) but there isn't a place where the js community really comes together outside of JSConf and the range of ideas is a diverse as the community. Maybe it would be a good idea to carve out some time at developer events that bring these groups together to discuss what people want out of the language and invite a leader from that group to a TC-39 meeting some time after. I can carve out some time at NodeConf and I can talk to the BackboneConf guys about doing the same. > > David > > [1] https://github.com/JSFixed/JSFixed/issues/1 _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
