On 06/04/2008, at 1:38 AM, Brendan Eich wrote: >> Sure, >> developers will be able to explicitly mark areas in their code which >> they deem appropriate for another developer to change, but that >> strikes me as a bit of a fantasy land. > > The fantasy here would be that JS has been kept down on the same- > origin and small-scale storybook farm where it was born. It's in > the big city now. ;-) > >> The majority of code which requires patching by external developers >> was never written to be patched, but people do it anyway. This is >> good, don't you agree? > > See above.
I'm not denying that the problems you're trying to fix aren't problems, it's just that I believe a wholesale locking down of the language will be too drastic and may result in a shift away from the language Javascripters have come to know and love. To give some context, when you speak of "producers" & "consumers" of Javascript code I guess I would classify myself as a predominant consumer. You may be surprised to hear that mutability is one of the things that I love about the language, and that I don't particularly "want greater integrity properties" (despite desiring the side effects :) ). I have experience as both a Javascript & Actionscript 3 programmer, so you could say that I've had a little bit of a taste of what's to come. One experience of mine you might be interested in is as a consumer of Adobe's Flex framework. Quite often, I feel the need to extend the various Flex classes (as you do). Unfortunately, many of the classes have properties defined as "private" instead of "protected", despite being clearly suitable candidates for consumers to extend. This results in developers like myself being forced to copy-paste entire classes just to override "high integrity" properties. In Javascript, this would not be an issue. Do you get the feeling that the majority of developers who aren't writing the Javascript you're talking about will be left with a new language that doesn't fit their development profile? Do you think that the developers who will write large-scale Javascript will cater to those who are used to a more traditional approach? My gut feeling to those two questions are "yes" and "no", but unfortunately that's all it is; a gut feeling. Cheers, -- Nathan de Vries _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
