Big news for the future of the Web: JavaScript 2 (ECMAScript 4) is dead, though pieces of it will live on in the new ECMAScript 3.1-based (informally dubbed "Harmony") specification. The members of the ECMA Technical Committee 39 (Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google in favor of ECMAScript 4 and Microsoft, Yahoo in favor of the less ambitious ECMAScript 3.1), which had been at odds over the future direction of the JavaScript language for some time, finally agreed upon the new direction. Brendan Eich, the original creator of JavaScript, broke the news on Wednesday (8/13).
The details of what the new unified specification will look like are far from finalized at this point, but clearly it will be a very scaled back version from the ambitious ECMAScript 4 proposal. Some early results:
- Packages, namespaces, and early binding from ES 4 are off the table for good.
- ES 4 classes are being "rephrased": they will now be syntactic sugar for lambda-coding and Object.freeze() (which was proposed in ES 3.1)
- JavaScript getters and setters are being fast-tracked as part of the new specification.
- ES 4
letexpressions seem to have some general agreement among committee members.
The announcement has sent ripples across the Web. Adobe, which had built ActionScript 3 to closely match anticipated ECMAScript 4 features, has maintained that they will not change AS 3 at all in response to the new direction. Some have speculated that Microsoft's motivation in bucking the ECMAScript 4 standard--and certainly the main factor in why it was abandoned--was political.
Whatever the reasons for abandoning ECMAScript 4, it is certainly clear that JavaScript will now evolve at a much slower pace than some had hoped or anticipated.
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I agree, things will now go back to square one as the committee process reboots.
Adobe on the other hand will be unfettered and will drive forward with real implementations and will ship much of the old ES4 goodness. To read more, go to http://www.embedthis.com/blog/?p=14
Michael,
Adobe kept ActionScript closely tied to JavaScript in order to stay in the comfort zone of most web developers and to counter perceptions of being "non-standard". These are hardly reasons to backpedal on the work that's been done on Tamarin, and I think Adobe would be wise to sever the tie between AS and JS.
[...] days ago6 votesA foray into the land of Javascript 2 monkeys>> saved by mamun155 32 days ago2 votesECMAScript Harmony>> saved by amanteja 32 days ago5 votesRant : ECMAScript 4.0>> saved by GenePitneyFan 33 days ago6 [...]
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