Subj : Re: ECMAScript standards committee
To   : =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Georg_Maa=DF?=
From : Brendan Eich
Date : Sun Oct 10 2004 10:09 am

Georg Maaß wrote:

> Shanti Rao wrote:
> 
>> As the language gets more complicated,
> 
> 
> Not the language, but the compiler / interpreter become more 
> complicated. If you do not use difficult language features then YOUR 
> language remains as simple as YOU wrote it. But if otheres need 
> additional patterns of abstraction and JavaScript does not provide them 
> to those that need them, they will leave JavaScript and look for 
> alternatives.


C++ shows how complexity in language design can't be hidden, 
effectively, from most users.  It's not enough to say "don't use these 
new features".  People use everything, in general, and the more complex 
the tools, the worse they'll mess up.

Why are you worried about C#?  I'd worry more about Python, although 
"worry" is too strong.


> #2,
> 
> Why should JavaScript 2.0 less stable than JavaScript 1.5?


Because any new implementation will have more bugs than an old one?


> #3, and #7 become imperiled.
> 
> JavaScript is not easy to learn. There are too many differences at least 
> inside the last 4 years of JavaScript 1.5, where implementation details 
> changed very often, which sometimes cause script incompatibilities 
> within core JavaScript 1.5, when running with different old 
> implementations. JavaScript is only easy as long as you do only trivial 
> scripting.


What incompatibilities do you mean?  The relevant standard is ECMA-262 
Edition 3, and we've fixed a bunch of conformance bugs (minor bugs, but 
real) over the last four years.

If you mean JS1.5 features that extend ECMA-262 Edition 3, then I would 
still be interested in a list of these bugs.  The changes I recall were 
to improve 1.5 before finalizing it, which we're still doing, slowly.

/be

.