thoughts on ES6+ direction + modules

[David Bruant]

Le 11/02/2013 00:53, Andrea Giammarchi a écrit :
> involve as many developers as possible, rather than provide /already 
> decided internal decisions based in already decided internal 
> pools/ nobody ever heard about out there (public pools or it didn't 
> happen)
hmm... I had skipped that part initially.
There are some accusations here and, as a JS dev, non-TC39 members, I'd 
like to say that I disagree strongly.

Here are a handful of public things related to TC39:
1) es-discuss
2) meeting notes with extra care and formatting since recently 
https://github.com/rwldrn/tc39-notes
3) http://wiki.ecmascript.org where drafts and accepted ideas are documented
4) bugs.ecmascript.org
5) spec drafts [1] are released on a monthly-basis

I recently questioned a feature [2], based on this public material. 
Public discussion happened. I'm balanced on the de-facto conclusion, but 
the least we can agree on is that a public discussion happened.
I'm willing to agree on a lot of things like:
* the different communication channels create confusion
* the wiki isn't always up-to-date (Rick did some good cleaning job 
recently, though)
* some discussions on es-discuss aren't documented in a condensed format 
and re-happen in some cases
* maybe on occasions Allen is too quick in adding things to the spec 
drafts (WeakMap.prototype.clear case), etc.
I personally put all these issues on the fact that TC39 is a group of 
human beings. They make mistake like any other group of human beings. 
They haven't fully solved the "efficient communication problem", but no 
one has. At least, these errors are public. They may make a barrier to 
participation higher than what we'd wish, but I wouldn't think it's on 
purpose and you can propose ideas to solve this problem. I have thought 
about it several times and haven't found a satisfactory solution yet.

Accusing of internal decisions based on internal pools may be a step too 
far. Please be more specific in your accusations so we can discuss 
things as I did with WeakMap.prototype.clear. The blurry finger-pointing 
game isn't moving anything forward.


On listening to JS devs:
1) over the last couple of years, (at least) Dave Herman and Brendan 
Eich have been dev-conf-crawling with ES6/future of JavaScript talks, 
asking for feedback and involvement from the JS devs community. They 
could have chosen to talk about other things or not talk at all.
2) Rick Waldron and Yehuda Katz who could be easily labeled as coming 
from the JS dev community have joined TC39.

What else do you want? "involve many devs". Maybe devs should get 
involved. I felt concerned about the future of ECMAScript I stepped up.
I find particularly ironic that some in the Node.js community are 
bitching about what happens for modules after saying [3]: "We have these 
standards body [ECMA is cited] and Node made a very very conscious 
effort to ignore them and have pretty much nothing to do with them".
It feels to me that the Node community is discovering that what they are 
a part of the JavaScript ecosystem, that ECMAScript and TC39 are part of 
this ecosystem too and they should felt concerned about what's happening 
to ECMAScript. Hopefully, they'll discover soon enough that they can 
send feedback based on their experience to affect TC39 decisions.
I feel dev involvement boils down to a very simple cost/benefit 
analysis. Either you feel concerned about the future of JavaScript 
enough to get involved in discussions that affect your future. Or you're 
too busy making things happen [4] and that's cool, but you've chosen 
your priority and that is not the future of JavaScript.

David

[1] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:specification_drafts
[2] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2013-January/028351.html
[3] 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GaqxIMLLOu8#t=1094s
[4] https://twitter.com/substack/status/300085464835174401
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