The problem is these large standards bodies are always controlled by the players with the most amount of money making their "standards" useless to IMO. A public specification and an open source reference implementation is good enough for me.
No it's not a toy language that's for sure. Anyone who has read the ES4 draft will concede that it's not something you just play with. In fact I haven't seen such a bloated monstrosity since the day I read the UML 2.0 spec.
Just read the section about packages and namespaces and you're going to want to kill yourself. And they're making the same mistake as C++, Java and C# before. They don't include generic types (aka templates) from the start. The language includes everything plus the kitchen sink and the dirty dishes too, but they're not including generic types even though everybody now knows that statically typed languages without type parameters don't fly. You can be absolutely sure they're going to add it in the next version and, as always, it won't be pretty.
I really hope Microsoft is successful in slaying this monster once and for all!
I'm not aware that I said anything about Microsoft's design abilities. I'm hoping for Microsoft's clout to kill something I consider horrible language design. And I don't care the least what Microsoft's motivations are. Just read the ES4 draft and then let's have a debate about that design if you like.
I played with AS3, not only were I not impressed, I hate how it is a scripting language yet more verbose than java. I'm not saying AS2 is any better. AS3 fixed many things that were wrong in AS2, but at the same time, they bloated it to a point were it is not really a scripting langauge anymore.
Crockford was one of the many reasons Microsoft wanted Yahoo. ES4 is a really fun language implemented in AS3. I think ES4 was a bit bloated for javascript (getters and setters) but I am saddened a bit that such a fun event model and language will not be avail in the browser. This just delays things longer and longer. I feel a little let down by Mozilla and Adobe.
They took a small, useful and elegant language, in part crippled by horrible, horrible, ugliness (e.g. for inner functions this points to the global object), and in preference to just fixing it, Javafied it.
This is not to say that ES4 should merely be ES3 spec polishing, but that ES4 describes a language not in the spirit of ES3. True, the spec ensures backwards compatibility, but in the sense of some new language that just happens to have ES3 support.
I think "javafied" is a bit unfair. ES4 continues the tradition from the original JS to copy Java-syntax where appropriate. "class X extends Y {}" looks indeed very Java-like, however the semantics are quite different, much more akin to classes in Python. But it would be silly to choose a gratuitously different syntax just to satisfy the Java-haters.
