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ECMAScript 4.0 Gone, My Reaction
Well, I just got back from a nice weekend reunion with some College friends and I am greeted with the news that ECMAScript 4 has been officially killed in favor of ECMAScript 3.1.
Adobe has included many things in ActionScript 3 (like packages, namespaces, bindings, etc) that were all proposed for ECMAScript 4 and will now not be in the 3.1 standard. So, my initial reaction was “crap”, this is a big problem as ActionScript 3 has been tied so closely to this now defunct proposal.
However, upon reflection and reading a first reaction from Mike Chambers, I now believe that this may be a really good thing for ActionScript as any handcuffs that were slowing Adobe’s progress on the AS3 base are now removed. Progress will probably be expedited as there will be less hesitation on keeping things out of the standard simply because they were not part of the ES4 standard.
So hopefully, we will see new features added like native overloading for methods, Iterators, private class constructors, static classes, etc.
Well, that is my 2 cents, what do you think?
Topics: ActionScript 3, Adobe AIR, Flex | 5 Comments »
August 19th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Method/Constructor overload…WOO HOO!
That’d be MUCHHHHHH welcomed in AS3.
I’d like to see if they would really deviate from the proposed spec seeing as time may come around for ECMA’4 to be proposed again.
Do you think they would go rogue and do their own thing?
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Rich Tretola Reply:
August 19th, 2008 at 7:17 am
I don’t know if they will, but I wish they would. I say forget the standard and just build the language the way they see fit.
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August 19th, 2008 at 6:26 am
“…as any handcuffs that were slowing Adobe’s progress on the AS3 base are now removed…”
I’m really hoping this will be the case! :0)
I’ve just gotten used to the AS3 language and bought loads of books relating to it and just in general invested quite a bit of my time, money, sweat and tears into AS3 that it would be criminal for them to shift it all around (which not matter what I highly doubt that will happen).
Lets face it, Adobe know that AS3 is good and it has a lot of features that we all wanted to see so they would never take a ‘backward step’ they would always have to keep moving forward and that is what I think will happen.
I look forward to AS4 with relish!! :0)
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August 20th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
How many Flash/Flex developers expected their investment in learning AS3 would transfer to other platforms anyway? The only reason I learned Actionscript was because Adobe provided a platform which had a low barrier to entry (familiar language syntax to C/Java/JS, affordable / free tools, big designer and developer base) and tremendous capabilities (graphical, audio, networking, OS agnostic) compared to other platforms.
Look at haXe community and the open source community is doing. The language war is irrelevant in the big scheme of things. If anything, Adobe should provide for multiple languages against the Flash runtime because their has been a lot of discussion about AS3 being to geared towards developers and has left designers behind, though I know some say they shouldn’t be coding anyway. Without a “scripters’” language that increases the barrier to entry and people will look at other languages and platforms which may not be as feature-ful but free as in beer and freedom and comprehensible. Without advanced language features, you’re limiting the capabilities of your best developers. Not good for a platform we want to grow!
As this politicking ensues, I’m happy about investing my time in learning haXe.
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August 27th, 2008 at 2:14 am
i want to see work on the dynamic aspects of Actionscript, like Proxy, working on Dynamic Class performance, reflection, Meta programming in AS3… make sockets really good….and I want the ability to fiddle with compiled AS byte code… pixelblender/AIR so we can build our own photoshop? ecma, scmeckma… also, Flashplayer 10, nuff said…
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