On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 8:23 AM, Douglas Crockford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Brendan Eich wrote: > > > And over-minimizing a language imposes a complexity tax on programmers > > using it.
That is true. > > To decide whether to evolve JS or shrink it, you need only look at two > > things: 1) problems JS hackers run into every day, which are not solved > > by more idiomatic functional programming hacks that add cycle and space > > bloat to their libraries and applications; 2) competition from other > > languages in runtimes vying to displace the browser. > > I think this is the specific point of disagreement. Complexity in a language > does not necessarily reduce the complexity of programs. Not necessarily, but to be specific, simply adding 'private' access modifier would avoid a closure. This is good because its a lot more convenient and a lot clearer. I think the opposite may > be truer. The difficulties we have had in the development community since > 1999 > were not due to over-minimization. They were due to features that did not > work > as expected or reliably over the various brands and versions. That is true. Implementation differences are significant difficulties. Other difficulties had to do with browser differences/competing technology platforms (<layer>, document.all). There are also limitations to the language itself that cause problems (no access modifiers, limited typechecking, enumeration). I disagree that limitations in the language did not cause difficulties. I think the opposite is true. I think that developers ran into problems when trying to add to Object.prototype. I think developers have struggled trying to figure out if [some_object] was a function or array. I think that developers exploited closures for all that closures had to offer. Closures are the most useful thing we have because there simply aren't other alternatives available. Garrett > > > _______________________________________________ > Es4-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss > _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
