I see a lot of merits of JS in Director. You open the door to bringing more people into Director quickly with a lower learning curve. Those people might be ActionScript programmers, they might be C++ programmers or Java programmers.. it doesn't really matter. I have difficulties moving between various languages, whenever I spend any amount of time in Flash I come back to Director and start putting ";" after each line. Now I have the option of using JS Syntax to code and I will use it at times. It also means that I can go out to the net and find certains large chunks of code already written and ready to just drop in and use. It means that when I go on vacation, someone on my team that knows JS can at least have a chance in hell of debugging the program or fixing a small problem.
JS is also very different then Lingo, therefore it adds a degree of flexibility that Lingo might not offer. It has regExp object from JavaScript so you get RegEx search and replace at runtime. JS is unicode under the hood, so you get some "quasy" unicode handling (until you go to display - but if your display is a Flash sprite, you might just get away with the unicode remaining intact). Its also a prototype based language that lets you do certain things that well, I can't say I like, but adding new methods and properties dynamically at runtime.
There are somethings that JS will let you do that you would in the past have used a Flash object for like some string splitting, splicing and manipulation couple that with the RegEx and you have some pretty powerful things.
If JS Syntax can bring new developers into Director, they might well adapt to and learn Lingo overtime, but this gives em the opportunity to get their feet wet comfortably before diving in. Lingo is faster then JS Syntax, so Lingo will become an asset to learn for speed intensive things. But why beat the bush, you like Lingo, I like both. I've been using JS Syntax rather intensely for sometime now and I think if you give it a shot, you'll find uses for it.
Also, JS Syntax was a driving force behind the cleanup of the DOM in Director making it much much easier to work with Windows and even LDMs and many other subtle things that happened under the hood.
So is JS Syntax good for Director, absolutlely. It forced a clean up of some aspects of Lingo and it will make Director more accessible to some new users. The more users, the more sales, the more sales the more money that goes into development.
Sincerely Mark R. Jonkman
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