On Oct 28, 2007, at 2:16 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:
On 10/28/07, Mark Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But even if you have succeeded at integrating together more good
ideas
into a coherent language design than have many previous brilliant
language designers, I have another concern: Standards bodies should
not do de-novo design.
JS has evolved since IE6 was released. Many of the "new" features are
already available in ActionScript, Mozilla, Opera, and elsewhere.
Beyond what has happened since MIcrosoft tried to stagnate the web,
ES4 takes into account solid (and far from novel) research from the
'90s on generic functions (Dylan, Cecil) and structural types (Modula
3, others), both of which are variously hard-coded or latent in
JavaScript: see the existing +, <, and other operators; see also
object and array duck types used for data definitions, JSON, and the
like, with ad-hoc shape-testing code enforcing the latent type
discipline (e.g. MochiKit's Base.isArrayLike).
The most novel aspect of ES4 is the gradual typing support (Siek and
Taha; Flanagan et al.), but this machinery (like, wrap, the
compatibility type relation) is almost trivial to prove. You could
argue that it is not worth including, but putting scare quotes (or
scare-Latinisms) around it to make it seem bleeding-edge would be bogus.
ES4 is not radically new and risky. No one criticizing it in general,
vague, and by some reports misleading terms has produced specific
evidence to the contrary.
But I'll go further, to call out what may be a disagreement over the
proper function of standards bodies. I believe that standards bodies
should synthesize well-studied, relevant research results,
implementation extensions shipped for years in derived dialects, and
pragmatic solutions to small bugs in the existing language defined by
the standard body, when working on the next version of the standard.
Whatever the motivations of ES4 critics, the assertion that standards
bodies should not host such collaborative, developer- and user-
oriented work means in practice that big companies will dominate
standards bodies, as I wrote here recently. That may be fine for pay-
to-play consortia and their biggest (and best-paying) members. It is
not good for developers, users, small and medium size vendors, or the
public in general.
/be
_______________________________________________
Es4-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
