ECMAScript Edition 4

Web 2.0, Meet JavaScript 2.0 by Jeremy Martin

• OOP at last? Are AJAX programmers really crying out for that? "Classes will provide far more flexibility through its many designators and directives (final, dynamic, extends, implements, etc.)"


• static type checking - great for compiled code, but for interpreted? maybe they're planning on introducing a bytecode VM in the next edition, incompatible with .Net, JVM, and Parrot?


• namespaces, constants, operator overloading, not null operator for DBMS interactions


• program units look cool but why units, why not dynamically loaded/linked classes? I guess to permit non-OOP code to have units too.

It seems like a good portion of the developer community, along with other browser developers, are in disagreement on evolving JavaScript in the direction of Java, PHP5, and C#.

Why not just leave JavaScript non-OOP and add another language to the browser runtime (e.g. IE supports two, JS and VBA) called something like Livescript, thereby maintaining backward compatibility and freeing browsers up to begin again on the perfect client side Ajax language?