| > they tried to convince ECMA and Brendan Eich to go along with adding immutable classes into JavaScript. The historical causality runs the other way: I gave Waldemar Horwat keys to the JS kingdom at Netscape and in ECMA TC39 TG1 in late 1997 when I went to cofound mozilla.org. Waldemar then designed "JS2" aka "ur-ES4" (my term) which is still archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20010119185300/http://www.mozill... https://web.archive.org/web/20001206082000/http://www.mozill... Believe it or not, Microsoft on the ASP.NET side got excited about this ur-ES4 work and did their own version, shipped server side as JScript.NET around 2001: https://www.drdobbs.com/a-talk-with-andrew-clinick-on-micros... The team at Macromedia I was in touch with after Firefox 1.0, mainly Gary Grossman, Edwin Smith, and Jeff Dyer, were trying to do a successor to Gary's ActionScript work (which was based on JS). They tried to license Sun's small footprint Java VM, for full Flash (not FlashLite) on mobile devices, but when Sun learned it was going to run ActionScript 3, not Java, they denied a license. So Ed whipped up a proof of concept that the Macromedia folks could do it themselves, and this led to AVM2 (open sourced as Tamarin with Mozilla; alas the team got pulled back to work on a doomed Flash for mobile play, so Tamarin was in practical terms abandoned). My work with Macromedians was a high point of early Firefox era standards rebooting. Jeff and I went to Geneva in spring 2005 to meet with Ecma and Microsoft folks to restart JS standards work in TC39. When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6. But immutable classes originated with Waldemar's JS2/ur-ES4 work in the very late '90s. |