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ECMAScript, The New C++?
By David Utter
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-11-01
Everything but a call for a kitchen sink subroutine has been tossed into ECMAScript 4, leaving a couple of bloggers wondering why.
ECMAScript has appeal in its simplicity, Gabriele Renzi suggested at the Print Me blog. But the economy of learning it may be eclipsed by the latest version of ECMAScript, also known as ES 4.
"ES4, on the other hand, seems to have included almost everything that came out from programming languages in the last 50 years, save Prolog and APL," said Renzi, a university student in Rome.
"For example, it has prototypes, interfaces, classes, metaclasses, higher order types and generic functions, which for what I can tell entails all the work ever done on object-orientation (maybe predicate classes are missing, but they may be there too)."
The problem with such an abundance of features could come from a couple of places. A blog post by the verbose Pinderkent cited these issues.
"It has taken nearly a decade to get decent support for the 1998 C++ standard from the major compiler vendors," said Pinderkent. "It does little good to have language features standardized, but not actually implemented by any language implementations for many years."
"Many current JavaScript-based Web applications have numerous and obvious flaws. Unfortunately, it seems that ECMAScript 4 will perhaps only make the problems worse."
One commenter said there is reason for ECMAScript optimism. "The Adobe Tamarin engine, open sourced and donated to the Mozilla foundation, already implements ECMAScript 4," said Simon Francis.
"This code is fast and not buggy, and shows that ECMAScript is a reality that will soon be here."
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.
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