Comments on: Brief talk on ES5 and Mozilla support for it http://whereswalden.com/2010/02/08/brief-talk-on-es5-and-mozilla-support-for-it/ Mozilla, politics, economics, law, backpacking, cycling, and other random desiderata Sat, 19 Jun 2010 05:15:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Jeff http://whereswalden.com/2010/02/08/brief-talk-on-es5-and-mozilla-support-for-it/comment-page-1/#comment-139931 Jeff Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:33:34 +0000 http://whereswalden.com/?p=1352#comment-139931 If you go to the first slide (after the title page), you'll see this: <blockquote> ECMA-262 3rd edition (ES3, 1998) ECMA-262 5th edition (ES5, 2009) </blockquote> The version with better typing was ES4, which ended up being scrapped due to complaints about scale (a number of which I thought valid) and due to mundane standards politics. This wasn't entirely bad — ES4 was, I think, overly ambitious — but it did mean we lost out on some useful opt-in ideas to avoid type errors, and we lost out on having a single syntax for class-based systems (like Base.js and others have been reinventing with different boilerplate for years). (And for anyone out there who says type errors don't happen, I can point you to at least one I've written in JS that had to be painfully debugged; optional but enforced type annotations of the kind ES4 had would have eliminated that problem.) If you go to the first slide (after the title page), you’ll see this:

ECMA-262 3rd edition (ES3, 1998)
ECMA-262 5th edition (ES5, 2009)

The version with better typing was ES4, which ended up being scrapped due to complaints about scale (a number of which I thought valid) and due to mundane standards politics. This wasn’t entirely bad — ES4 was, I think, overly ambitious — but it did mean we lost out on some useful opt-in ideas to avoid type errors, and we lost out on having a single syntax for class-based systems (like Base.js and others have been reinventing with different boilerplate for years). (And for anyone out there who says type errors don’t happen, I can point you to at least one I’ve written in JS that had to be painfully debugged; optional but enforced type annotations of the kind ES4 had would have eliminated that problem.)

]]> By: Harsh http://whereswalden.com/2010/02/08/brief-talk-on-es5-and-mozilla-support-for-it/comment-page-1/#comment-139930 Harsh Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:20:25 +0000 http://whereswalden.com/?p=1352#comment-139930 Hey, what happened to the strongly typed version of JavaScript that was to be called JavaScript 2.0? Hey, what happened to the strongly typed version of JavaScript that was to be called JavaScript 2.0?

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