On Aug 13, 2008, at 8:02 PM, Peter Michaux wrote: > Are these > type-related features what the community of ECMAScript 3 programmers > were really asking for emphatically years ago? Is the community really > asking for now with the surge of functional programming?
One hacker's opinion: Yes, absolutely. The big pain point for me has been scaling an app out from a team of 1 with <10K LOC to a team of many with 100K+ LOC. Even with an incredibly rigorous testing infrastructure (comparable in code size to the product itself), development on the application just hasn't scaled well. Many JS hackers don't build apps at a large scale, but JS-based apps will only get bigger in scope over time, so this pain point will get more acute. It's all about time spent. A large app is impossible for a new-hire programmer to comprehend end-to-end. We mitigate this by using unit tests as a safety barrier, but over time our tests have grown to take about 10 minutes or so to run. That's way too long to wait for a pesky misspelling bug. To the extent that there's static type checking available to catch errors early on, it's a huge productivity gain. (Although not necessarily one that's easily noticed -- one tends not to see the problems that grow and kill slowly.) Your statement above implies that types and functional programming are mutually exclusive. Are they? I don't see it that way. _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list Es4-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
