
Adobe Screwed By EcmaScript Standards Agreement - soundsop
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/08/ru-roh-adobe-screwed-by-ecmascript.html
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cstejerean
The problem is these large standards bodies are always controlled by the
players with the most amount of money making their "standards" useless to IMO.
A public specification and an open source reference implementation is good
enough for me.

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bprater
If you messed with Actionscript in the past, but haven't played with
Actionscript 3, you'll be impressed. It is no longer a toy language.

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fauigerzigerk
No it's not a toy language that's for sure. Anyone who has read the ES4 draft
will concede that it's not something you just play with. In fact I haven't
seen such a bloated monstrosity since the day I read the UML 2.0 spec.

Just read the section about packages and namespaces and you're going to want
to kill yourself. And they're making the same mistake as C++, Java and C#
before. They don't include generic types (aka templates) from the start. The
language includes everything plus the kitchen sink and the dirty dishes too,
but they're not including generic types even though everybody now knows that
statically typed languages without type parameters don't fly. You can be
absolutely sure they're going to add it in the next version and, as always, it
won't be pretty.

I really hope Microsoft is successful in slaying this monster once and for
all!

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axod
You _really_ think Microsoft could ever come up with anything well thought out
and well designed?

Anyone using siverflash or whatever it is?...

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fauigerzigerk
I'm not aware that I said anything about Microsoft's design abilities. I'm
hoping for Microsoft's clout to kill something I consider horrible language
design. And I don't care the least what Microsoft's motivations are. Just read
the ES4 draft and then let's have a debate about that design if you like.

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drawkbox
Crockford was one of the many reasons Microsoft wanted Yahoo. ES4 is a really
fun language implemented in AS3. I think ES4 was a bit bloated for javascript
(getters and setters) but I am saddened a bit that such a fun event model and
language will not be avail in the browser. This just delays things longer and
longer. I feel a little let down by Mozilla and Adobe.

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soundsop
_I feel a little let down by Mozilla and Adobe._

I don't follow. I thought it was Microsoft that torpedoed the standard. What
did Mozilla and Adobe do wrong?

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astrec
They took a small, useful and elegant language, in part crippled by horrible,
horrible, ugliness (e.g. for inner functions _this_ points to the global
object), and in preference to just fixing it, Javafied it.

This is not to say that ES4 should merely be ES3 spec polishing, but that ES4
describes a language not in the spirit of ES3. True, the spec ensures
backwards compatibility, but in the sense of some new language that just
happens to have ES3 support.

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olavk
I think "javafied" is a bit unfair. ES4 continues the tradition from the
original JS to copy Java-syntax where appropriate. "class X extends Y {}"
looks indeed very Java-like, however the semantics are quite different, much
more akin to classes in Python. But it would be silly to choose a gratuitously
different syntax just to satisfy the Java-haters.

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wallflower
I wonder if Microsoft did some backdoor maneuvering because Flash + ES4
Browser support could give it an unfair advantage over Silverlight.

