IDE support?

[Brendan Eich]

On Sep 13, 2011, at 12:26 AM, Brendan Eich wrote:

> On Sep 12, 2011, at 12:22 PM, John J Barton wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM,  <es-discuss-request at mozilla.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Some of the discussion on this thread amounts to "IDEs work great for
>> typed languages so let's make JS typed".  What if we started with
>> "What would be great for JavaScript developers"? Then we would not
>> waste a lot of time talking about static analysis.  It's the wrong
>> tool.
> 
> Why are you assuming that conclusion already? Why not answer your own question "What would be great for JavaScript developers?" and if the answer includes type inference, great?

John and I corresponded privately and we agreed that static is less than static+dynamic. That is something I tend to ass-ume, being an implementor (SpiderMonkey does analysis when compiling, and of course lots of runtime feedback-based code generation).

So, static+dynamic. The static side has some powerful algorithms to bring to bear. Dynamic is necessary due to eval and kin, and gives strictly more information (and more relevant information!).

/be