The Word War of Internet Giants

The latest buzz in the world of programming is centered between two internet giants: Brendan Eich, the CTO for Mozilla and Chirs Wilson, Chief architect of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. They are currently in a word war regarding the next best step of Ajax’s main programming language, JavaScript. Known among other developers as ECMAScript, Eich and Wilson are thinking of two different paths of the popular language. Eich wants to radically change JavaScript while Wilson wants to let it stay as it is and the new changes to be integrated in a new language. There’s no actual face to face debate between these two geniuses. But you can see from each other blog, they are referring to each others plans. Wilson clearly pointed out his stand in the apparent upgrade through his blog, “As I've frequently spoken about publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem -- not 'breaking the Web' -- is something we take very seriously. 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.” Wilson continued his personal opinion with this statement, “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." Eich responded to this blog which is also found in his open letter/blog. “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. 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.” What Wilson is afraid of this update is it could create incompatibility in present JavaScript. “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. 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.” On the other hand, Eich pointed out that Wilson’s view and proposal is only for Microsoft’s benefit and not for the development of the web. “At best, we have a fundamental conflict of visions and technical values between the majority and the minority. 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.” Eich is the creator of JavaScript. So by standards, he can do whatever he wants with it. But since Internet Explorer is being used by more than all the web browsers combined, they do have a say in something. We don’t when will this word war end but if you want to read their blogs personally, here are the links: Wilson’s Statement on JavaScript (ECMAScript) Update: http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2007/10/31/what-i-think-about-es4.aspx Eich’s Letter: