On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 7:01 PM, Anne van Kesteren <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Jason Orendorff > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Set aside absolute-url imports. Suppose we just dropped them. Would you > > still think that module names are URLs? If so, do you think about other > > languages in the same way? > > I think it's weird to try to equate JavaScript with those languages. > Not weirder than trying to equate it to HTML and CSS, surely! They operate on multiple platforms that do not share a universal > addressing system and therefore a layer of abstraction had to be > invented to make it easier to work those languages across multiple > platforms. I don't think that's the reason those systems have abstract names for packages/modules. All of these systems were designed for use on systems with hierarchical filesystems supporting absolute and relative paths. Any one of them could all have chosen to implement `import` by mapping the package/module name directly to a filename in a dead-simple, one-to-one way; but none did. (Even C, a language designed 40+ years ago by people whose key technical virtue was their willingness to eliminate unnecessary abstractions, lets you configure #include paths at compile time.) Are the different environments where people will deploy JS code really *more* uniform than where people deploy Java? I don't know. But surely not so much so that third-party packages should just go ahead and embed the locations of their dependencies. I guess that's another point I had not really thought of, the web > platform will get a way to execute some script at "fetch", which is > basically a low-level version of the module loader. > Yeah, these two efforts should meet and talk before long. Related ideas going around, for sure. -j
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