+1. Very nicely put. /be
On Jun 13, 2011, at 11:51 AM, Bob Nystrom wrote: > On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 2:38 PM, Brendan Eich <bren...@mozilla.com> wrote: > Something about classes in JS makes me sad, an emotional effect I can't > explain fully. > > <philosophical> > > I'm one of the biggest fans of this class proposal, and I feel a twinge of > that sadness too. I look at it as JS taking a step away from Scheme and > towards Common Lisp. > > I think one of the big reasons people love Javascript is that it has the same > appeal of old school LEGOs: it gives you just a few kinds of pieces but you > can combine them in a huge variety of fashions to make all sorts of novel > things. Adding class syntax feels a bit like how LEGO pieces started to get > more specialized. > > As a creative-at-play, specialization like that sucks. You're taking away my > ability to invent something new and replacing it with some ready-made thing > that I can't modify. However, as a pragmatic person trying to get work done, > this a win. If it's my job to make LEGO cars, a prebuilt chassis makes my job > easier and faster. > > Since JS is used by working programmers who just want to ship solid code, I > think it's helpful to have features like this that encode common patterns and > make them easier to express. I look at class syntax as a pre-built kit for > the kinds of things we find ourselves having to make from scratch over and > over again. That's great because, honestly, I'm not innovating on "how to > define reusable kinds of entities" in JS everyday. I mostly follow the same > constructor+prototype pattern that many of us do. So if I can have an > ready-to-use syntax for that, it means less time typing that boilerplate over > and over, and more of my time spent on the things I am innovating on: user > experience, libraries, etc. > > At the same time, it's worth remembering that class syntax doesn't take any > toys away from you. You still have all of the JS primitives you know and love > to play with, and if classes aren't a good fit for you, you're always free to > go your own path. In that sense, they're more like classes in C++ than Java: > they enshrine a common pattern but don't rebuild the entire language around > them. Like C++, you can use them where they make sense and not where they > don't. > > </philosophical> > > In part I think class is the wrong word, as cowboyd tweeted (see below). > > Agreed. "class" isn't ideal, but it's probably the best we have. It carries a > lot of baggage, some of which is helpful and some of which isn't. I think > most of the pragmatic baggage is helpful (things you make with this class > proposal behave pretty similarly to classes in other languages) but the > conceptual baggage isn't: people hear "class" and think we're trying to turn > JS into Java, which for many is a short hop away from COBOL and having to > wear a suit to work. No one wants that to happen to JS. > > - bob
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