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JavaScript Creator Expands Predictions for 2.0


Mozilla CTO talks details, discusses plans for Web language

By Alex Handy
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August 8, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
JavaScript 2.0 won't be part of the religious wars that plague programming languages.

That's the message from Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and the creator of JavaScript, who said that version 2.0 of the language won't take sides in the age-old battles between strongly typed and weakly typed languages, and between static and dynamic languages. To Eich, all of these practices and functionalities have their benefits, and he therefore plans to make sure JavaScript 2.0 has the best of all worlds.

Eich detailed the changes and plans on the docket for the next JavaScript version, now officially known as ECMAScript 2.0, after the Ecma International standards body in which it is being developed. Eich explained that this new version of the language will also be developed in the open, with periodic beta code drops being made available at www.ecmascript-lang.org.

Major changes include the addition of support for byte arrays, tuples and vectors; the proposed changes also extend to the evolution of the language's type system. Eich said his goal is to improve JavaScript's object orientation, and that adding arrays and vectors will help to push the language in this direction.

“I'm an old kernel hacker,” said Eich, “so I use C, still. I'm not a dynamic-only or static-only person. I think there are trade-offs. The Web is too big for only one language.”

On the subject of type safety, Eich said that there is no clear winner between weakly and strongly typed languages. When it comes to type systems, said Eich, “there's so many weak static ones which slap you when you do something silly. We believe untyped objects will be around forever.” Eich attempted to comfort his audience of Web programmers by noting that he was not intending to make JavaScript behave like Java, in this regard.

“People who've used Java and don't like it let me know, loud and clear, they don't want anything like classes. We're not saying ‘no’ to classes, [instead] we're doing them in a way where they're buttoned-down. These things already exist. The DOM [Document Object Model] is full of nominal types. We're formalizing that in the language,” said Eich.




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