Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather have a fixed JS (no BS coercion, actual hashes, method_missing, better binding rules, local vars by default, "use scrict" checks for everything, int64 arithmetic, and a non manual ad-hoc way to create prototype chains) as the next version, instead of the "backwards compatible" pile-on that the upcoming version is.

Such a JS would enable them to reuse large parts (or the entirety) of the current interpreters/JITs, just as well as the next ECMAScript, but would also fix most BS and enable further performance improvements.

That is, what I propose, would be a slightly incompatible release, say: "JavascriptFixed".

As for backwards-compatibility, this would be played out in two ways. Transpilers (like Coffescript) could convert "JavascriptFixed" to Javascript, and people could use the script tag to denote the presence of "JavascriptFixed".

Given vendor support, the familiar syntax, and the performance improvements, it could take over JS in 4-5 years. No we'll have decade or more until the whole mess that's the next version becomes popular, and we'll still have the whole JS mess, just swept under the carpet.

No method_missing please. The lack of it is one of the things I appreciate about JavaScript in contrast to Ruby. It's used similar to macros, but it tends to be used by those who forget that the first rule of macros is Don't Write Macros.

But the second rule of macros is "they are very powerful", DO write them for the cases that need it.

Anyway, method_missing is not at all the same as macros. At least in Objective C that I know it's equivalent, it's very useful.

Just remember to add Weak Reference support too. This is really the only missing feature that I want in JS.

I politely submit that what you actually want is Python, Ruby, or Lua in the browser.

Haven't we had python in the browser for a while now with pythonwebkit, pywebkitgtk, and the other webkit-native-DOM python bindings?

Do those work if you want cross-browser compatibility for users who don't have certain plugins?

I'm thinking technologies like Skulpt or Pyjamas, that let you use Python in JS, are better. It's been a while since I investigated this situation, does anyone know of other players?

The other way around; Firefox nightlies let you use Python to script the DOM directly.

Well, warts aside I came to like Javascript.

And by keeping to Javascript, only better and fixed, it would be easier to reuse and adapt huge parts of the browser ecosystem and toolchain.

Ruby maybe. Lua lacks proper unicode support. Python, I've used since 1998, but can't stand the lack of proper closures (and/or how the syntax makes them awkward) for web work.

And there's two more issues with all of them:

1) they are dog slow compared to modern JS JITs like V8 (and alternative implementations like PyPy are not as mature).

2) on the browsers, due to the sandbox and other issues, you can't use most of their libraries, that use native extensions and such, so you just get their syntax, not their batteries.

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