JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web

Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, give a keynote at The Ajax Experience.

Ajaxian have placed the presentation online so everyone can read up on some of the thoughts and discussion on JavaScript 2 and more.

Here we got to hear from the mouth of someone deep into the ECMA process about what we are going to see in JavaScript 2 and importantly why:

Motivation for JS2

• 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

As Brendan flicked through these slides, I couldn’t help buy realise how important the decisions are. These changes are probably going to profoundly effect all of our lives in the near future.