ECMAScript 4 was implemented in ActionScript 3[1]; a very nice language to work with IMHO. The members of the ECMAScript steering group launched into a public fracas on their respective blogs[2] which eventually ended in the draft being canned, despite the fact both ActionScript and Silverlight were already based on the standard... shame.
> The second system syndrome is that evil effect that often happens when redesign a small, working system so that it becomes a huge leviathan built by piling new features over new features.
> Today I was reading the overview of ECMASCript 4 from ecmascript.org, and I got this very bad feeling that maybe the fourth version of ES, is suffering of an extremely strong case of this problem.
I dont know who is that guy , but what a load of cr*p ... it's people like him that got us stuck with what is javascript today. People often complain that Flash prevented Javascript from being widely adopted , the truth is that Macromedia/Adobe tried to push a better Javascript that would have helped the language then and today.
Imagine we had ES4 and HTML5 today. Nobody would be complaining about how much javascript sucks , and there would be no need for typescript, coffeescript ,etc ...
I wrote it many years ago, but if you think it's wrong I'd be happy to understand why.
I have never been against Flash nor ActionScript(which I don't know enough to criticize) but my understanding was that ES4 was vastly more complex than even AS ever was, rather than being an incremental change as ES6 is.
And please note I wrote
"""
ECMAScript 4 seems cool, I want to use a lot of those things (yay for multi method dispatch!), but maybe it is changing the language a little bit too much .
"""
And I wish I could influence what the dev world does, but I believe it is unlikely.
Imagine we had ES4 and HTML5 today. Nobody would be complaining about how much javascript sucks , and there would be no need for typescript, coffeescript ,etc ...