On Apr 30, 2010, at 6:32 AM, Jürg Lehni wrote:
After having used my own version of an implementation of
Function.prototype.bind for about 4 years now I recently became
aware of the one that appears to now be standardised in ES5.
The following page suggests its definition stems from the
Prototype.js library: <http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=proposals:static_generics
>
The page argues that "if we do this, we should emulate Prototype,
including its 'pre-args' feature, since it actually hacks on
Function.prototype and it's a de-facto standard".
I have to disagree, especially with this so-called 'pre-args'
feature, which prepends arguments to the final argument list. There
are quite a few libraries out there, Prototype.js is only one of
many, and seems to have lost significance over the past years.
Calling it a de-facto standard and shaping parts of the future
ECMAScript standard after it in order to remain compatible with it
seems questionable.
It's a fair point. Perhaps we prematurely standardized
Function.prototype.bind.
But did you know that Dojo's hitch also allows leading arguments to be
bound too? Likewise MooTools's bind. Only jQuery's proxy does not.
I always say that it is early days in the JS library standardization
process, and we should not prematurely standardize. Nevertheless I
think ES5 is better off with Function.prototype.bind than without. We
could have done nothing to serve this use-case, but that seems
strictly worse. We could have done something else but it would have
been under a different name.
Instead we went with what seemed the de-facto standard. It's still a
point in common among several top libraries.
There are other areas were similar considerations seem to have
played a role, the oddly named Object.keys() comes to mind.
We've covered this recently. It was one of Doug Crockford's
suggestions, IIRC. I like Doug's generally shorter names, but it
indeed does not fit with Object.getOwnPropertyNames. This is a design-
by-committee artifact, IMHO. We'll try to do better in the future in
unifying name styles.
/be
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