Comment #52 on issue 235 by brettz9: Support the Javascript E4X extension http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=235
Firstly, 5 million speakers is not a few. Secondly, my point is not that Esperanto is necessarily an ideal language (though it may be--as with any standard, consensus must be the ultimate criterion, and there's been no representative international meeting to decide the issue), simply that certain things need to be established as standards in order to meet their objective, including ideally yes, representing the will of the people, indirectly if not directly. However, there would be no need of standards at all, if things just naturally evolved into universal dominance. The status quo would be the eternal standard.
Should people have scoffed at the potential for Hebrew, a reconstructed language, to become an official language in Israel, a country of a very large variety of native language speakers, just because its speakers were few (not even comparable to Esperanto or E4X with its Firefox support)? Should they, or people in any country who have adopted and promoted a national standard language ("by force" in your terminology), whether it was India promoting use of Hindi in more provinces which had little history with it or China which brought a common language where people even in neighboring villages formerly could not intercommunicate (and now we are indeed all in a global village where we can't communicate with our neighbor)?
Is intercommunication and convenience really a lofty goal worth mocking, or it a practical step which pragmatists should be the first to endorse and advocate?
Admittedly the analogy does break down at some level. In human language, there are not, and mostly likely cannot be, dominant critical private players, and its evolution, tied into both national pride and insufficient international solidarity, and a need for public funding in order to sufficiently train the public in something as complex as a human language, is even less likely to lead in a reasonable time period into a dominance on its own especially where interoperability (e.g., learners of far eastern languages mastering English) is low and costly, whereas in web standards, we naturally have the likes of Chrome, Firefox, and IE who can implement some feature and immediately make it a candidate for standardization and the others can, relatively speaking, easily jump on board if they are so inclined.
As far as "trolling", my apologies for an intemperate remark, and you are of course right that the discussion should be about whether it should be added to V8 specifically, and I can see merits to an argument about speed and readability. However, I don't find it helpful to the discussion to have such broad or inaccurate strokes painted against E4X or XML on which this decision presumably also rests. XML is a pretty well-established "fad" (whose demise is grossly exaggerated, especially if you look at document storage or enterprise use), if that's what it is, especially given that XML's similarities with HTML make E4X well usable for XHTML generation (e.g., see http://blog.brett-zamir.me/?p=213 ) as well as "pure XML", not to mention the other advantages of E4X such as filters and accessors already mentioned. Again, my apologies for jumping the gun, but I hope we can fairly recognize the merits of both sides.
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