Again good points. Java itself could have been fixed if it were not for the Sun marketing people who rushed "the electronic toaster language" out where it was not fit to go. Sun was filled with computerists who knew what they were doing, but it was quickly too late.
And you are right about Mark Miller. My complaint is not about JS per se, but about whether it is possible to get all the cycles the computer has for certain purposes. One of the main unnecessary violations of the spirit of computing in the web is that it wasn't set up to allow safe access to the whole machine -- despite this being the goal of good OS design since the mid-60s. Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: David Barbour <dmbarb...@gmail.com> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org> Sent: Mon, July 25, 2011 12:59:16 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] Alan Kay talk at HPI in Potsdam On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Igor Stasenko <siguc...@gmail.com> wrote: how different our systems would be, if guys who started it 20 years back would think a bit about future? The guys who spend their time thinking about it lose, just as they always do. Worse is better wins on the market. Brendan Eich was right to fear something even worse than his rapidly hacked brainstorm child - i.e. if it were not JavaScript/EcmaScript, we might be using proprietary VBScript from Microsoft. Do you remember those battles between behemoths trying to place proprietary technologies in our browsers? I do. 'Embrace and extend' was a strategy discussed and understood even in grade school. I'm a bit curious whether Google will be facing an EOLAS patent suit for NaCl, or whether that privilege will go to whomever uses NaCl and WebSockets to connect browsers together. It is interesting to see JS evolve in non-backwards-compatible ways to help eliminate some of the poisons of its original design - eliminating the global namespace, dropping callee/caller/arguments, development of a true module system that prevents name shadowing and allows effective caching, and so on. Mark Miller, who has performed significant work on object capability security, has also started to shape JavaScript to make it into a moderately sane programming language... something that could be used as a more effective compilation target for other languages.
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