Dave Herman: The Future of JavaScript

Mozilla Labs engineer and TC39 representative Dave Herman joined us at YUIConf 2011 to give this keynote talk on the future of JavaScript, covering many of the new features currently under consideration for ES6, the next edition of the ECMAScript standard.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• dave herman
• javascript
• ecmascript
• es.next
• es6
• tc39
• programming
• yui
• yuiconf
• yuiconf 2011
• yahoo

[clifcollins1]

Thanks for the information, great job...

Do not make the language application dependent, most of the additions not useful. I like JavaScript it makes no assumptions, after 32 years of development I am trying to learn how to not make assumptions and I am constantly trying to simplify my code (language independent), and I use no abbrivations.

My recommendations: “structure” “new ByteString()”

“get function name(...)” “set function name(...)” "read" "write" "open(url-spec or file-spec)"

[jmerl1n]

I don't like that classic example code. Yes, it is classic, but yes, it is tragic as well. There's no implied (at least for .txt files) reason for synchronizing those GET requests. In that case, it's best to just effectively fork/join the requests. Fire off as many as is reasonable at once and when all of them have completed, yield back to the caller. Since JS is (presently) guaranteed to be single threaded, writing the join part is really simple.

[jeromewilson]

Thinking about it, maybe shimming is best handled by, for instance, a CoffeeScript compiler... Oh hang on I'm just getting around to watching the last 5 minutes of the talk, looks like this might be covered...

[jeromewilson]

Looks brilliant. Someone had better start writing the legacy browser shim library now so that we can be using all this goodness within 10 years of its release. Erm, not me though, I'm kind of busy and stuff... :)

[twooster]

All hail Pyscript!

@iglor, because arguments includes all passed-in arguments, including those that are explicitly declared in the function signature. So you have to count your arguments and shift/offset accordingly. Also, unlike 'this', 'arguments' is not a reserved word, which lets people do stupid stuff, like overwrite it.

[iglor]

Too much adding, too less fixing. Who needs ..rest if arguments was an array?

[elisklar]

Excellent talk, and I can't wait to see all of these features come to life in our everyday job!

[nemo2e4]

Amen for record and replay.

[sombriks1]

indeed 08:28 is a classic!