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Comment by ninetyninenine | Hacker News Reader

No. Javascript should be split into 3 languages and html and css should be split into 20 languages.

Seriously frontend is already the most fragmented and fast changing area of web there is. Don’t split the language.

You wouldn’t see much difference as a user of those tools. And if you’re writing vanilla JS, you’d have less features creeping in over time. So it seems like you would benefit from this kind of change.

Yeah but if I change jobs or work on another project then I’d have to learn two standards.

Did you read the article? The sugared JS would be a superset of the target JS. So you would only need to learn the sugared.

Need to learn both because I still need to know what is sugar in order to use the subset.

> and fast changing area

Who cares? If backwards compatability is maintained then this fails to have any impact on my experience as a developer. It sounds like the VM maintainers are busy making their own lives hell. Not my problem.

> Who cares?

I do. Maybe if someone programs in one language it's okay for them to keep up with language changes, but if you have to constantly juggle multiple languages it becomes a real chore to stay up to date with every one of them.

I use the language. The existence of new language features has not forced me to adopt them. The standard library for browsers is a different story but it is always going to be.

Thankfully.. both maintain reasonable backwards compatability where security is not otherwise implicated.

> The existence of new language features has not forced me to adopt them.

You still need to be aware of them when you encounter unfamiliar syntax.

You didn't read the article.

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