Infrequently Noted

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

Comments for Name Soup


hey Daniel:

Your first paragraph is spot-on. 3.1 is a very short-term set of improvements and bug fixes to the language while Harmony will be the next version past that.

As for Class-based semantics, I think the big problem w/ what was being proposed for ES4 wasn't that classes were being made available, it was that they were being shoe-horned into a language which already had classes but no syntax for them and therefore it was duplicating lots of things to add the semantics you're familiar with. Prototypal inheritance isn't bad, but it's not enough. Class-based inheritance and straight-up multiple inheritance has 20 years of being proven to be terrible for many tasks. We need something in the middle, be they "interfaces with bodies", real semantics for mixins, or Traits.

Regards

by alex at
I may be dumb but I still don't understand what the nature of the changes that have been agreed to are. If I understand correctly ES3.1 will be implemented in the short term, then Harmony. ES3.1 includes just a set of small changes but the general form of Javascript doesn't change much. Harmony will then introduce changes to the shape of your javascript code with features like class-based semantics ?

To be honest I would assume most of the people looking in from the outside like me are mostly interested in when it will become easier for them to code javascript by adopting some familiar class-based semantics.

by daniel at