Remember this from 281 days ago? It seems that the two sides have apparently patched up their differences and agreed on a future plan.

Brendan Eich: Executive Summary

The committee has resolved in favor of these tasks and conclusions:

1. Focus work on ES3.1 with full collaboration of all parties, and target two interoperable implementations by early next year.
2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both semantic and syntactic innovation.
3. Some ES4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This conclusion is key to Harmony.

4. Other goals and ideas from ES4 are being rephrased to keep consensus in the committee; these include a notion of classes based on existing ES3 concepts combined with proposed ES3.1 extensions.

I don't know about you, but it sounds to me that ES3.1 (Microsoft & Yahoo!) has won, and ES4 (Adobe & Mozilla) is no more.

Maybe James Ward of Adobe played the "Flex 3, which uses ActionScript 4, which will be the next version of ECMAScript" hand once too many!

I don't know.

Responses[1]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on August 13, 2008 8:34:39 PM CDT #

In an InfoQ interview, Neal Gafter talked about closures, Java 7 features, and Scala--.

However, the following passage resonated with me the most:

Neal Gafter: So, I think most programming languages have one person or a small number of people that form a core team that guides the design of the language, and the evolution of the language. Stroustrup for example for C ++ and Anders for C# and I think that Alex Buckley and James Gosling could play that kind of role for Java.

Someone definitely needs to assert stronger leadership over Java the programming language, to provide a coherent vision, to move it forward, and to make progress.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on August 13, 2008 7:58:15 AM CDT #