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17
May
2006

Brendan Eich on JavaScript 2

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Ajaxian has posted a set of slides from Brendan Eich on the future of JavaScript. As you probably know, we have been tracking the ECMAScript Edition 4 spec very closely in our implementation of ActionScript 3, so many of the concepts will be familiar to you. Because of timing, there are proposals in the new version of the language that are not going into ActionScript 3.

The ones the I’m particularly excited about are:

  • Parametric types (otherwise known as generics)
  • let blocks (removed after more careful reading)
  • yield

Are there any ideas in this slide deck that you would like to see in — dare I say it — ActionScript 4?

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13 Responses to “Brendan Eich on JavaScript 2”

  1. John Dowdell (May 17th, 2006 at 11:58 am)

    Thanks, Sho. I had been curious about that phrase “JavaScript 2″… is that a Mozilla brandname, with the actual reference spec being ECMAScript 4? The top search hit I found for the phrase was a 2003 document which sounded somewhat different: http://www.mozilla.org/js/language/js20/

    tx, jd

  2. sho (May 17th, 2006 at 12:09 pm)

    That’s right. When folks from Mozilla say “JavaScript 2”, they mean “the new version of the language we are going to put into the browser which is based on ECMAScript Edition 4”.

  3. Till Schneidereit (May 18th, 2006 at 4:24 am)

    Hi Sho,

    Although the enhancements you mention are really exciting, I’d consider the following ones more important:
    – Structural types
    – Nullable types
    – Decimal type and the associated math

    Also, the following enhancements make for really nice syntactic sugar:
    – Array comprehensions
    – Operator overloading

  4. Sho (May 18th, 2006 at 9:48 am)

    Good picks, Till!

    I actually misread Brendan’s slides, and I mistook one of his examples of the let block syntax to be something like lambda expressions or Ruby’s block syntax. Upon re-reading it, I wonder if it wouldn’t just be better to redefine the behavior of var and deal with backward compatibility through a flag. Yield and generics are still exciting to me.

    Nullable (and non-nullable) types are interesting to me, but I haven’t fully thought through the implications. When would I want a nullable number?

    Decimals are a clear win.

    Array comprehensions would be more interesting to me if they were lazy evaluated (like list comprehensions).

    Operator overloading is great and scary at the same time.

    Thanks for the input!

  5. sho (May 18th, 2006 at 9:58 am)

    One more question… What’s your interest in structural types? How would you imagine using it?

    Thanks!

  6. Nicolas (May 21st, 2006 at 5:24 am)

    I’m gonna do a shameless plug :)
    The haXe language already has Generics and Structural types (signatures). But also Enums (variants) and type inference. It target the Flash Player 6 7 8 and soon 9, but can also be used to write Javascript/AJAX applications and Server side with database access. haXe.org to visit the website ;)

  7. sho (May 22nd, 2006 at 5:16 pm)

    Cool, Nicolas. I haven’t played around with haXe yet (how do you prounounce this?) but I am familiar with MTASC, which is great work. I’m looking forward to seeing how haXe evolves.

  8. John C. Bland II (July 16th, 2006 at 3:54 pm)

    Sho, I know this is a late comment but Till makes me want to respond. :-)

    Overloading is a def need. I really desired it in AS 3 but, as we know, it isn’t there. In C#, overloading makes code soooo much better. Instead of writing a method and running through the arguments array to see what was passed in you can write multiple methods with different arguments for each scenario. This works GREAT for constructors (c# code here):

    public Table(string name, string schema, List columns)
    {
    this._name = name;
    this._schema = schema;
    this._columns = columns;
    }

    public Table(string name, string schema, bool hasView, List columns, List viewColumns) : this(name, schema, columns)
    {
    this._hasView = hasView;
    this._viewColumns = viewColumns;
    }

    That kind of stuff would make AS 4 super sweet. Another thing I’d love to see is something like this (sample AS code):

    public function blah(myvar:String[]){

    }

    This way we expect a string of arrays in myvar vs the need to create a custom type.

    Anyways, I haven’t dove head-first into AS 3 but I will def’ say it is growing up right before our eyes. :-)

  9. sho (July 17th, 2006 at 9:51 am)

    Great comments, John. Fortunately, I think you and Till may actually agree, since I think he was referring to operator overloading, not method overloading.

    Operator overloading lets you redefine operators like ‘+’ and ‘=’. In some cases, it can really help, but on the whole, it has some potential for abuse.

  10. Wonders for Oyarsa (October 27th, 2006 at 1:45 pm)

    Operator overloading is a Godsend for things like Vector and Matrix math. I don’t suppose there is a way of curbing the abuses?

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