JavaScript 2.0, aka ECMAScript 4

I just discovered that there is an ECMAScript 4—better known as JavaScript 2.0—in development. As a shameless language slut, I immediately dove into the language overview, and it’s pretty neat.

This turns JavaScript into a much more useable language, that I could see doing serious development in. I’m well aware that today’s JS isn’t a “toy”, that it’s got an interesting prototype-based object model under the hood; but I’ve found the language so loose as to be difficult to use. This new version adds a full class model, much better support for iteration, a form of generators/coroutines, and more.

Intriguingly, it also offers type-checking, which has been absent from most mainstream dynamic languages. I know it’s trendy to use “duck typing”, but I find that languages with no compile-time type-checking frustrate me because I make so damn many mistakes that aren’t caught until runtime; which means things I could have fixed in two minutes in C++ or Objective-C take half an hour to fix as I run the program over, and over, and over, discovering and fixing one problem at a time.

Given the concurrent developments in Apple’s JavaScript interpreter, I’m getting pretty excited for JavaScript. I hope that in addition to making it blindingly fast, Apple will also add ECMAScript 4 support, and make it easy to access the language outside of a WebView.

Previously: BLIP news (Python! Detailed spec!)
Next Post: Doing application updates via version-control

By
Jens Alfke

On
June 17, 2008
at
6:09 pm

As
Web, Languages, Computers

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