On 11:59 AM, Allen Wirfs-Brock wrote:
On May 10, 2011, at 4:53 PM, Douglas Crockford wrote:
I look at ECMAScript as serving four groups:
1. The beginners for whom the language was designed.
2. The web developers who owe their livelihoods to the language.
3. The scientists who will use the language for greatness.
4. Language designers and critics.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "scientists". The third group I
would identify are professional software developers who will use the
language to implemented complex applications of the soft that today
are more commonly implemented using Java, C++, etc. These are larger
systems that need more emphasis upon upon abstraction building in
order to manage the domain and application complexity.
At a meeting today, the dichotomy we used in talking about this is the
difference between "imperative programmers" and "abstraction
builders". Imperative programmer know how to use basic imperative
statements to manipulate predefined abstractions. Abstraction
builders create such abstractions. I think that all of your #1 and
much of #2 are "imperative programmers". While we need to continue to
improve the language for this group we also need to start better
serving the needs of the abstraction builders. Much of what we have
promoted to proposal status seems to be oriented target on this latter
group.
Both application developers and library/framework developers benefit
from clear, widely understandable code. Adding bizarre special
characters and programming constructs that require world-class
programming language expertise to understand helps neither group.
jjb
Allen
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