The Death of JavaScript 2.0

JavaScript - better known by it's official name ECMAScript - was due for an overhaul (ECMAScript 4) - which was to be named JavaScript 2 - but the ECMA International Standards body decided to scrap that effort.

So, what's up with that?

It turns out that they are working to ratify a 3.1 specification that will have some "bug fixes" in it - and then are planning to take a whole new look at it in a project code named "Harmony."

Tell that to Adobe. You see, the basis of JavaScript 2 ECMAScript 4 was to be based on Adobe's ActionScript 3 (yes, the thought of that makes me shutter as well). Since they've decided that the name "JavaScript 2" is dead - so is the thought of basing it on ActionScript (thank goodness!).

So with Microsoft and Yahoo on one side and Adobe, Mozilla, Google and Opera on the other - "Harmony" is meant to split the difference and see if they can come to some common ground. All of this, of course, is after they get the 3.1 version out the door.

"First, the difference between ECMAScript 3.1 and ECMAScript 'Harmony' should be made clear. 3.1 is a 'bug fix' for the current JavaScript," said Alex Russell, co-creator of the Dojo Toolkit and a member of the Ecma technical committee working on the specification. "Harmony will pick up from 3.1 and try to introduce many of the types of features that were slated for ES4 but with different syntax and from a different approach. This is great news for everyone since it means that the standards body is going to be working toward a future [that] is deemed 'good' or 'bad' based on what's good for the language as it will exist in Web browsers. There is likely a mandate for the language outside of the browser environment, but designing the next language in a vacuum of real-world users of new syntax was going to hound the ES4 effort. That risk is now gone."

So, where does that leave us? It's sort of hard to tell. Microsoft still has 3 different implementations of JavaScript that can run in a browser: JScript (via Windows Scripting Host), JScript.NET and JScript for the DLR [Dynamic Language Runtime] (via Silverlight).

And Adobe isn't going to change or kill their ActionScript 3 either as expressed by Mike Chambers, also an Adobe engineer. He blogged that "ActionScript 3 is not going away, and we are not removing anything from it based on the recent decisions. We will continue to track the ECMAScript specifications, but as we always have, we will innovate and push the Web forward when possible (just as we have done in the past). ActionScript 3 isn't changing and we are not going to dumb down future versions of ActionScript,"

So THERE! I still believe it will be another two to three years before we can get all of those players to play nice together and to finally agree on a single implementation in a Harmonious way. Until then - we'll all still have to live with all the nuanced "versions" of JavaScript and all the various implementations and "extensions" to the language. *sigh*