Tech Presentations

Presentation by Brendan Eich at The Ajax Experience 2006 on May 12th 2006 (S5/HTML/Printable version)

Quotes:

Designing for the Next Ten Years

• Other minimal JS1 solutions seem likely to scale poorly too
• We can’t make so big a spec jump again, so this is it
• Browsers implementations should show up in 2007 (Mozilla and Opera for sure)
• Some browsers will lag, but let’s think long-term: 2010
• Are there useful tools to speed migration?
  • A JS2 to JS offline translator, for example
  • Write your web app using JS2 exclusively
  • Run the translator over all of your JS2 code
  • Serve the translated files to old browsers

Motivation

• Fix problems in JS1 that bug people daily
• A type system to enforce invariants
  • instead of writing/debugging lots of value-checking code
  • optional annotations, an extension to JS1
• Programming in the large
  • Package system
  • Visibility qualifiers (namespaces, private internal public)
  • Optional static type checking
• Support bootstrapping and metaprogramming
  • Self-host most of the standard objects
  • Self-host compiler front end and type checker
  • Reduce need for future ECMA Editions