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I remember sitting outside a Mountain View Starbuck's with Lars Hansen, then at Opera, and Brendan Eich, then at Mozilla, and listening to Lars explain that he'

I remember sitting outside a Mountain View Starbuck's with Lars Hansen, then at Opera, and Brendan Eich, then at Mozilla, and listening to Lars explain that he'd lost faith that ES4 was realistically implementable. I think that was the day I knew it was dead. I spent years working on ES4 and I'm not sorry it failed (namespaces in particular were just a disastrously bad idea). The whole affair was a formative experience for me.

mycall 6y ago
How did namespaces in ES4 differ from namespaces in Java?
- olliej 6y ago
  My recollection was that there were modules, packages, and namespaces. Which was kind of a problem.
- zwetan 6y ago
  In Java you would use packages to group together class definitions same as with C++, C# where you would use namespaces to do that aka define the scope of classes in AS3, the packages are used the same, group collection of definitions, not only classes and interfaces but also variables, constants. The namespaces in AS3 are used to define the visibility of definitions at the class level, a bit like being able to define your own "public" attribute. In ActionScript 3, by default the AS3 namespace is open, for example with a builtin like Array instead of using the push() method defined in the prototype, it uses the push() method defined in the AS3 namespace. See https://github.com/adobe/avmplus/blob/master/core/Array.as#L187 https://github.com/adobe/avmplus/blob/master/core/Array.as#L... But you also have mode to compile with -ES to not open that AS3 namespace by default. In ES4, namespaces could do more advanced stuff like namespace shadowing (only a proposal at the time), see https://web.archive.org/web/20070629024201/http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/spec/chapter_12_namespaces.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070629024201/http://developer.... For AS3, see 1.9 Namespaces / 12 Namespaces / etc. https://github.com/as3lang/ActionScript3/wiki/Specification https://github.com/as3lang/ActionScript3/wiki/Specification
zwetan 6y ago
And yet a good part of ES4 been realistically implemented in ActionScript 3 and used by many developers for over a decade. And those namespaces in AS3 (much simpler than in ES4) I think are quite a good idea, they allow to control what is visible or not and/or to switch which implementation you use. For example when some AS3 builtins do not support some methods defined later in ES5.1 then ES6 etc. ES5 function trim():String ES6 function repeat(count:Number):String So yeah you not gonna use namespaces everyday for everything, but they do have allow to solve specific problems while "programming in the large".
chx 6y ago
No matter how many years, decades pass, the connections the Internet makes possible never cease to astonish me. Thanks for your work on ES4.

mycall 6y ago

How did namespaces in ES4 differ from namespaces in Java?

olliej 6y ago
My recollection was that there were modules, packages, and namespaces. Which was kind of a problem.
zwetan 6y ago
In Java you would use packages to group together class definitions same as with C++, C# where you would use namespaces to do that aka define the scope of classes in AS3, the packages are used the same, group collection of definitions, not only classes and interfaces but also variables, constants. The namespaces in AS3 are used to define the visibility of definitions at the class level, a bit like being able to define your own "public" attribute. In ActionScript 3, by default the AS3 namespace is open, for example with a builtin like Array instead of using the push() method defined in the prototype, it uses the push() method defined in the AS3 namespace. See https://github.com/adobe/avmplus/blob/master/core/Array.as#L187 https://github.com/adobe/avmplus/blob/master/core/Array.as#L... But you also have mode to compile with -ES to not open that AS3 namespace by default. In ES4, namespaces could do more advanced stuff like namespace shadowing (only a proposal at the time), see https://web.archive.org/web/20070629024201/http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/spec/chapter_12_namespaces.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070629024201/http://developer.... For AS3, see 1.9 Namespaces / 12 Namespaces / etc. https://github.com/as3lang/ActionScript3/wiki/Specification https://github.com/as3lang/ActionScript3/wiki/Specification

zwetan 6y ago

And yet a good part of ES4 been realistically implemented in ActionScript 3 and used by many developers for over a decade. And those namespaces in AS3 (much simpler than in ES4) I think are quite a good idea, they allow to control what is visible or not and/or to switch which implementation you use. For example when some AS3 builtins do not support some methods defined later in ES5.1 then ES6 etc. ES5 function trim():String ES6 function repeat(count:Number):String So yeah you not gonna use namespaces everyday for everything, but they do have allow to solve specific problems while "programming in the large".

chx 6y ago

No matter how many years, decades pass, the connections the Internet makes possible never cease to astonish me. Thanks for your work on ES4.