A better title would be "Towards old age, waiting for ECMAScript 6".
It's only been like 10 years already (since those features were promised for ES4), no need to move faster, please participating companies, take your time debating BS pedantic distinctions until the spec is finalized. Then it would only take 3-4 years until it has around 90% penetration so it can be used.
It's not like 14-15 years is a lot of time in technology. Perhaps only one generation of web programmers will have retired by then.
The issue being, of course, that a standard which is not implemented is of little use.
Last time around, a few stakeholders (mostly MS, but also Yahoo and Google) managed to railroad the proposal completely resulting in the watered down ECMAScript 5.
But this is the sort of basic functionality that shouldn't be coming in a standard nearly 20 years after the language was first released. This is especially true when other languages have had such functionality since before JavaScript was conceived. It's not like they're new concepts that post-date JavaScript's creation.
ECMAScript 4 had to be dropped when people realized that turning JavaScript into a JS-Java hybrid increased complexity rather than decreasing it. But the process of drafting ES4 and then disputing whether to go forward took a lot of time.
And don't forget that IE6 was Microsoft's latest and greatest for a long time, with little prospect of an upgrade. When IE progress was frozen with huge market share, the prospect of updating JS seemed like a pipe dream.
>ECMAScript 4 had to be dropped when people realized that turning JavaScript into a JS-Java hybrid increased complexity rather than decreasing it.
AS3 (which completely conforms with the ES4 draft specification) is a lot nicer to use than JavaScript (ES5.1 included). It gives you means to organize your code and your tools also have a clue what you're doing.
I'd rather live working around some oddities than with nothing at all.
But it's a false dichotomy, I'd say: nothing prevents them from being more agile and correcting any issues that is found in the spec in a dot update. A few people will have to update their code, or use some conditional code, big fucing deal.
Or they could, you know, provide a reference implementation -- e.g working with Mozilla or anyone interested.
Release it as an opt-in engine (e.g with something like "use strict") fix any issues that arise for 1-2 years, and make it a finalized standard from the on.
It's only been like 10 years already (since those features were promised for ES4), no need to move faster, please participating companies, take your time debating BS pedantic distinctions until the spec is finalized. Then it would only take 3-4 years until it has around 90% penetration so it can be used.
It's not like 14-15 years is a lot of time in technology. Perhaps only one generation of web programmers will have retired by then.