Namespaces as Sugar (was: complexity tax)

[Erik Arvidsson]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 07:32, Mark S. Miller <erights at google.com> wrote:
> Yes, agreed. Namespaces-as-Sugar (hereafter NAS) is too big for ES3.1.
> Perhaps it's too small for ES4. Again, it is simply my attempt to
> explain what I meant by "A language with some of ES4's syntactic
> conveniences but without ES4's semantics." I would be less happy with
> NAS added to a language than with nothing added -- the problem it
> addresses is a problem more in theory than in practice. The real
> problem in practice is module linkage. Dojo and YUI show that this is
> already adequately solved with patterns and libraries, with no new
> language mechanism needed.

This is the second time I hear you say that the namespace pattern used
by dojo and YUI is already adequate.  Let me debunk that myth.  Dojo
flattened their namespaces from things like dojo.foo.bar.baz to
dojo.baz since the ES3 namespace pattern is too vefrbose and painful
to use.  YUI people also complain that writing YAHOO.foo is painful
(all caps is hard to type).

Unqualified import of global objects is a must for programming at large.

I agree with Maciej here, if we can simplify the name lookup
significantly be removing unqualified import of property names then I
think we should do that.  That being said, having namespaced
properties seems useful and I'd rather have that if it can be made to
perform well as well as be made simpler to understand.

-- 
erik