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by leorocky 4367 days ago
Nay, the big companies that care a lot about these languages own them through and through. Look at Adobe's attempt at converging ActionScript and JavaScript in the abandoned ECMAScript 4th edition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#ECMAScript.2C_4th_E...

I think Microsoft was key in killing this. With respect to Dart, Google will have the ability to control Dart's future as long as it wants to and if it somehow lost control of the ability to shape the spec it will just do its own thing anyway, just like they have with Blink and standards (directoryReader comes to mind).
2 comments
magicalist 4366 days ago
You have it backwards with ActionScript. ActionScript 2.0 came out of the initial years of work of ES4, and ActionScript 3.0 came out after yet more work from TC39. Both were designed to directly take what came out of the ES4 process and fold it into ActionScript (so much so that you'll recall that originally Mozilla was going to use Adobe's Tamarin ActionScript JIT compiler as a starting point for their Firefox ES4 engine[1]).

Adobe was a big proponent of many of the big features in ES4, but so were Mozilla and others on the committee. Adobe was hoping that the work in AS2 (and eventually AS3) would anticipate what was coming and that JavaScript developers would be able to easily move back and forth between the web and Flash/Flex/whatever else they had planned at the time.

Of course influence went the other way as well: Adobe's experience with the needs of ActionScript 1.0 developers were informing what was focused on in designing ES4...but that's exactly why you bring people into committees, to help guide what comes out of them.

[1] http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

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floitsch 4367 days ago
This is a personal opinion, but I was honestly surprised how nicely the standardization process is going.

I was part of the team that started Dart (right place at the right time :), and helped design the language. Obviously we have some emotional binding to the language and would like to drive it into the right direction, but most of us are perfectly happy with others taking the relay.

We still have some ideas and proposals that we have worked on and that we want to champion, but all in all I just hope that the TC52 members will do a good job.

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