Guy Steele told me once that Sun registered it with ECMA so they could tell people (governments?) that it was a registered standard and that ECMA was the easiest/fastest/most compliant way to get there.
I’d always thought that ECMA was a weird place to register it.
We're at about the right point in the timeline to start calling it YavaScript which both solves the trademark problem and keeps us on the path laid out in prophesy.
...wait, no.
You still get to abbreviate it like JS, use the filename extension ".js", etc.
BeanJuiceScript
JS doesn't have to stand for anything. It's just 'JS', pronounced jay-ess.
Well, yes that’s the reason why standards bodies exist :)
Hmm, I see the same was done with Dart…
Like... "C" is a specification, "gcc" is an implementation. "Python" is a specification, "CPython", "PyPy", ... are implementations. "ECMAScript" is a specification, "webkit", "spidermonkey", ... are implementations.
"JavaScript" is a (trademarked) specification, and also "ECMAScript" and "JavaScript" are "very very similar" (wink wink)
They might have same features from the perspective of checklist. But path they developed and obtained those features is different, the syntax is different and there are probably also some subtle (if not big) differences in semantics. The similarities in feature list isn't result of 2 language "implementations" getting closer to shared specification, but at least partially looking at what features other programming languages have and then sooner or later developing their own version of those language features. I haven't read the ES4 specification or development discussions for ES6 so I can't tell whether differences are caused by ES6 classes being developed from scratch ignoring how they where described in ES4 or whether classes in actionscript were only very loosely based on the way ES4 described them. Either way the development of two languages at some point forked and further developed somewhat independently.
From what I understand graph is something like this: ES2 -> ES3 ES3 -> ES5 ES3 -> ES4 ES3 -> AS1 ES4 -> AS2 AS1 -> AS2 AS2 -> AS3 ES4 -> AS3 ES5 -> ES6
Is Python-the-language fully specified now? Of course there are now a lot of PEPs, but I seem to recall (way back then, even before PEP3000 was a thing) that the Python "spec" was largely the "CPython" implementation (incl. bugs and all), and "CPython" was not actually a real name but emerged from a need to distinguish the original Python implementation from "Python-the-language" as well as alternative implementations such as PyPy, JPython/Jython, IronPython...
Implementations of ECMAScript/JavaScript are things like V8 and Spidermonkey.