langreiter.com plain, simple: 2007-11-30-evolution!

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2007-11-30-evolution!

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6231 days AGO

Lars T Hansen: Evolutionary Programming and Gradual Typing in ECMAScript 4

"ECMAScript 4 (ES4) provides a range of facilities for evolutionary programming - evolving a program in stages from a simple script to an ever larger and more reliable software system. The most important facility for evolutionary programming is the gradual type system; also important are namespaces and packages, union types, generic functions, and reflection."

Also:

Brendan Eich: JavaScript 2 and the Open Web [ Ø HNS • ] — 'It's not as if JS2 is renouncing prototypes or closures in favor of "the Java way". That's a misinformed or careless misreading.'

Interestingly, Brendan disagrees with the notion that IE stagnation helped bootstrap the web application cambrian explosion 2.0. I still (2005-12-28-flawjax) think it was an absolutely necessary condition; could the Firefox developers have kept up with a rapidly developing moving target? I doubt it.

Anyway, be sure to read (at least) the conclusion: Type safety and fixtures for libraries (code intended to be consumed by many), typelessness for glue/control code. Sounds like The Right Thing.

earl mentions rather fascinating research by Michael Franz's group on dynamic language compilation: "[...] code traces observed during execution are dynamically specialized for each actually observed run-time type. For most benchmark programs, our prototype JavaScript virtual machine outperforms every other JavaScript platform known to us."