Brendan Eich on Ecma TC39, JavaScript.next, and Google Dash

If you are that old, you really ought to have better reading comprehension. My argument has nothing to do with Netscape, me, or my high horse.

Look, Netscape had a monopoly and put JS "on first" and just about everywhere. I'm done apologizing for that, I've made up for it in spades on standards work, and it's a fact I cannot recall and rewrite.

The precise point now, here on planet earth and not wherever you are, is that Google is not that new monopoly. Not yet, not likely for years even in their wildest dreams.

If Google were the monopoly Netscape was, sure: Dart would be the new JS. The two would co-exist for a long while but "replacement" would be conceivable so long as market power held up.

Since Google does not have monopoly power, and with the non-standardizing tactics of that leaked memo, Dart is unlikely to be adopted by other browsers. It's fragmenting. It's an invitation to others to inject their own would-be replacements and build a Tower of Babel.

Do you get my objection now?

Your point was, and I quote:

"Javascript itself was developed by a company (Netscape) in pretty much exactly the same way, for pretty much exactly the same reasons."

That's wrong on at least two counts:

1. ["same way"] Netscape had a monopoly, it wasn't injecting JS into a situation where there was already a scripting language widely used on the web and implemented among multiple competing browsers. It was not fragmenting a multi-lateral browser market or web content language ecosystem.

2. ["same reasons"] The Dart reasons adduced in the leaked memo are nothing like our reasons at Netscape for doing JS. We (marca and I, mostly) wanted a language for non-Java programmers, non-programmers even, which could be written directly in HTML. A language designers, beginners, amateurs could learn by the yard. We did that without failing to upgrade a prior such language already widely supported.

Dart, according to the leaked memo, aims to replace JS because JS can't be fixed. But who says JS can't be fixed? Why, the people making Dart, working at the dominant web company of the last decade! That's no "reason", it is a choice.

"I see the free market offering alternatives."

Uh huh. If Dart has native support only in Chrome, then it's not an alternative for people using other browsers. Then what?

The "free market" is a bogus political phrase. I'm in favor of markets: real ones that self-regulate by preventing fraud (a central clearing/blinding counter-party, bid/offer/open-interest/size transparency) and abuse of power (market winners capture governments -- this has happened throughout history, it's a big problem right now, see the Global Financial Crisis).

Talking about Google's anti-standards power games in the current multi-lateral browser market as if it's all "free market" goodness is b.s.

"If I'm not mistaken, IE supports Javascript, right?"

Think, floppybunny, think! IE supports JS because Netscape had a monopoly once it took over from Mosaic and grew the web via commercialization (SSL, another Netscape innovation). IE had no choice but to support "JScript", and indeed they were thus motivated to help standardize ES1. Standards, hmm.

Google has no such monopoly. The likely outcome of putting a native Dart VM into Chrome and (again per the leaked memo) using Dart for web app development in Google is not to make other browsers roll over and embed the native Dart VM as well.

Can you see Apple doing that? Microsoft? Mozilla would be expected to do it by all you bring-on-the-new-monopoly fanboys, but even if we did it wouldn't help.

We're in a multi-browser market. Competitors try (some harder than others, pace Alex Russell's latest blog post) to work together in standards bodies. This does not necessarily mean everything takes too long (Dart didn't take a month or a year -- it has been going longer than that, in secret).

Open standards development does not mean design-by-committee, either. Multi-browser collaboration among Apple, Mozilla, and Opera was what created HTML5.

Dart goes the wrong way and is likely to bounce off other browsers. It is therefore anti-open-web in my book. "The end justifies the means" slaves will say "but but but it'll eventually force things to get better". Maybe it will, but at high cost. More likely, it won't, and we'll have two problems (Dart and JS).

"Let's argue languages based on technical merits, not how or by whom they were developed."

Now that's just low. You know damn well that Google has kept Dart a secret, so none of us can assess its technical merit (maybe you work for Google and can?).

Sure, when Dart is released, let's argue in a new thread. This thread is about the fragmenting, essentially two-faced politics of the leaked JS strategy memo, and whether and why that's bad for the web.

If you want a new monopoly to sweep the web clean, bully for you. No such monopoly exists now, so realists will still have to work in standards bodies. Is Google really working in standards bodies? As Maciej Stachowiak points out in this thread and over on reddit, more and more of their extensions in Chrome are not being standardized, and apparently won't be proposed "later".

"I'm done apologizing for that, I've made up for it in spades on standards work, and it's a fact I cannot recall and rewrite."

Wouldn't it be fair then to at least give Google the chance to do that standards work with Dart after it's released before labeling the company anti-open?

How early should a language be announced? It's certainly not cool to drop it on the world when it's done and baked , solicit zero feedback, and then demand the rest of the world implement it. But it's also not cool to toss out some vaporware spec with no implementation and no empirical evidence that the language is any good.

Now that Apple has successfully marginalized Flash as a cross platform development environment the browser fragmentation will ramp up and we'll see more of this type of behaviour rather than less. Apple didn't start this fragmentation but they are committed to ensuring that the web is not a level playing field with technology segmentation like canvas and css ES. Microsoft has always tried to fragment the market with IE. Take for example the current version of web based Outlook which only functions at full power in the IE browser, otherwise you get the 'lite' incarnation.

And now that Google is joining the fray we're concerned? Not at all. There will always be applications that only run on one browser (or operating system like Android). This same methodology will be incorporated by Google for gmail or any of their other services which will allow them to control which environment gets the best features and allow them to leverage their technologies effectively when their competitors are already doing the same thing.

Open source is usable only by some vendors. My Opera pals say they can use it (I'd heard differently from others at Opera in the past). Microsoft, I'm told, cannot -- they cannot even read open source. This is public knowledge, it came out, e.g., as part of the IronPython project.

So Microsoft objected to WebSQL, since it depended on SQLite as source-code-is-specification. Writing a spec for SQLite or Dart is very hard. SQLite is >100KLOC in one .c file! Dart is at a guess bigger. Hence, reverse-engineering is required.

Reading code at this scale doesn't tell you enough. Testing, with good coverage, is required. Then you have to separate the over-specification due to abstraction leaks and bugs, from the intentional specification. That's hard work too, and while source code comments may provide clues, the source itself does not say what's what.

"Well shit. I definitely don't want to be one of those!"

Sorry, I was not addressing you specifically, rather the (many, more than I expected) people here and elsewhere who are asking for the new and good monopoly to rewrite the web by itself with more awesome languages.

The IE monopoly with ActiveX and all that was so long ago, the new generation did not live through it.