> In 2008 the standard was pronounced dead, and ES3.1 was renamed to ES5, which was a much more conservative and incremental update to ECMAScript. > The closes

> In 2008 the standard was pronounced dead, and ES3.1 was renamed to ES5, which was a much more conservative and incremental update to ECMAScript. > The closest thing we had for ES4, was probably Flash Actionscript 3. There was a point during the release of AS3 that some of us thought that Flash and the Web was eventually going to converge. > For more details on politics and history of ES4, check out this great article on the auth0 blog [1]. ECMAScript 4 was actually quite nice, Typescript like but ActionScript3 (AS3) was a great implementation of it. The classes, events, types (was also dynamic) and more were just so right. I used a ton of AS3 in Flash games, Flex and that moment just before mobile took over the world in 2008. From 2005-2008 Flash vs Silverlight was a massive thing and Flash video had revolutionized the world earlier with Youtube and others. Macromedia was a great company and I wish that Microsoft had bought them (they owned part) instead of Adobe. The big problem I think was that ultimately it was Macromedia that really started the movement and then Adobe bought them and was really pushing the charge with AS3/ES4 and it went right at the other tech companies platforms. Flex before apps was really webapps done right for a time. Silverlight was ES3 and Google had lots invested in Javascript with Maps/Gmail/Docs/etc. Microsoft and Google did not like that Adobe was leading it as they ran both big browsers at the time in IE/Chrome and killed off ES4 to go to the ES5 on path. Apple ninja'd in with apps in 2008 and one upped them all with WebGL, Canvas for a plugin free web (Flash/Silverlight EOL'd without notice) and OpenGL ES, Obj-C/C++ for app/handheld games. Apple and apps signaled a move away from the plugin web to standards web and native apps for better or worse with gave platform owners in appstores/browser more control of what technology is used. It is too bad, I think javascript would look more like TypeScript and be less of a mess today, this is coming from someone that loves javascript since the late 90s. Side note: I love all of Anders Hejlsberg language/platform design in Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript and Danish by ancestors so maybe I am biased. ActionScript 3 based on ES4 was along those lines of just right to me, the best format/language doesn't always win, the platform owners dictate technology history. [1] https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/ https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/