is ES4 getting too bloated?

[Yuh-Ruey Chen]

Don't get me wrong - I love most of the new features (some others I'm
just indifferent too). But I'm not implementing the interpreter; I would
be a user of it. My concern is that of the implementator's burden, and
from my point of view, if it takes a long time to implement ES4, it'll
be a long time before I can get to use ES4 in practice. What Michael
O'Brien just posted sounds very promising though.

I haven't had the time to look at the whole spec as a whole, and since
the spec is rather disorganized atm with a bunch of proposals, I'd have
a hard time doing that in any case. But what I've seen so far is pretty
good. I do kind of feel that there is some redundancy, i.e. there are
distinct features that seem to overlap a lot. For example, packages and
namespaces are both used to make programs more modular, albeit in
different ways. Likewise for program units and packages. But like I
said, I don't have a clear view of the spec as a whole, so I'll wait
until there are good prose sections describing the usage of features
before coming to a conclusion.

-Yuh-Ruey Chen

Garrett Smith wrote:
> On 10/21/07, Yuh-Ruey Chen <maian330 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I've been watching ES4 development and occasionally contributing input,
> > and I have noticed a somewhat disturbing trend. ES4 is getting ever more
> > and more complex.
> >
> > I understand ES4 is a multi-paradigm language and so must be packed with
> > features, but I don't think we want a repeat of the C++ template problem
> > (where it took nearly a decade just to get most compilers near
> > compliance with the C++ spec). My point is that although a significant
> > update to ES is needed, if it takes too long to implement a conforming
> > compiler/interpreter for it, the adoption of new features is going to be
> > slow. Heck, I wonder how willing MS would be to provide a fully (or near
> > enough to it) conforming interpreter for ES4 if the spec is so large.
> >
> Tamarin will be included as a plugin for IE.
>
> > Small proposals like bug fixes and reformed with and company, or
> > proposals that generalize syntax to make the language more elegant are
> > perfectly fine by me. But we already have such huge features like
> > classes, generators, namespaces, type system, and now generic functions.
> > Perhaps we should start deferring more features to ES5?
> >
> Which features do you feel are unjustified? Can you bring a specific issue?
>
>