Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich and Microsoft's Chris Wilson are
trading heated rhetoric over the proposed next version of ECMAScript, better known
as JavaScript.
Microsoft is quibbling with the ECMAScript Edition 4 effort, which is supported
by Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. "As I've frequently spoken about
publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem -- not 'breaking the
Web' -- is something we take very seriously," Wilson wrote on the Internet
Explorer team blog this
week. "In our opinion, a revolution in ECMAScript would be best done
with an entirely new language, so we could continue supporting existing users
as well as freeing the new language from constraints."
Eich is the creator of JavaScript, a programming language that has become a
bedrock Internet technology, helping drive much of the rich content and information
now common on the Web. Microsoft's implementation of it is known as JScript.
Wilson is the platform architect of Microsoft's Internet Explorer platform
team. He wrote
on his personal blog Wednesday that Microsoft's position has been misunderstood:
"Sadly, this seems to be turning into an 'ES4: yes or no' battle. That's
unfortunate, because I don't think anyone should settle into the trenches, and
I don't think the other Microsoft guys ever intended to say "everything
about ES4 is bad."
"I also think it's a shame that the response to any dissent has equated
to shouting the dissenters down," he added.
Writing
on his blog in response, Eich accused Wilson of spreading lies.
"You seem to be repeating falsehoods in blogs since the Proposed ECMAScript
4th Edition Language Overview was published, claiming dissenters including Microsoft
were ignored by me, or 'shouted down' by the majority, in the ECMAScript standardization
group," Eich wrote. "Assuming you didn't know better, and someone
was misinforming you, you (along with everyone reading this letter) know better
now. So I'll expect to see no more of these lies spread by you."
As for ECMAScript 4's purported shortcomings, Wilson wrote that the proposed
new standard may result in complications and incompatibilities with existing
Web sites and applications.
"As I understand it, on the other hand, the ES4 proposal introduces a
lot of new language functionality that essentially changes the character of
the language," he said. "I don't personally have a problem with that
language as a language -- but I think grafting that different-in-character-language
together with a compatible-and-performant implementation of the Javascript of
today is both super-hard (if even possible) to get right, and is ignoring the
bigger problems of language-for-web, namely interoperating with all the script
that is out there."
Eich charged in turn that Microsoft's arguments are self-serving. "At
best, we have a fundamental conflict of visions and technical values between
the majority and the minority," he wrote. "However, the obvious conflict
of interest between the standards-based web and proprietary platforms advanced
by Microsoft, and the rationales for keeping the web's client-side programming
language small while the proprietary platforms rapidly evolve support for large
languages, does not help maintain the fiction that only clashing high-level
philosophies are involved here."
