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I think this just fundamentally misunderstands how languages work in practice. In the vast majority of cases, switching languages is impossible, whereas picking

I think this just fundamentally misunderstands how languages work in practice. In the vast majority of cases, switching languages is impossible, whereas picking up new words or idioms within the same language is very practical. And as far as I know, this will be in a future version of ECMAscript, which means that most people will in fact be using this via babel?

Zababa 5y ago
"Switching languages is impossible" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You think you can't, so more stuff get added to the language, so it's less justified to switch, etc. And then you end up with people trying to use immutable structures in JS and having way worse performance (but there's records and tuples coming!). Many people that said that switching languages was impossible happily migrated to Typescript, because the migration was easy. You could do the same with something like ReScript, but instead of getting the codebase more and more strict like with TS, you would transform it more and more into ReScript. There's also often lots of opportunities for small greenfield projects/part of projects. > And as far as I know, this will be in a future version of ECMAscript This may be in a future version of ECMAscript. Stage 4 proposals are the one accepted, stage 3 are almost official. This one is stage 2.
- ledauphin 5y ago
  It's not _just_ a self-fulfilling prophecy - there are other factors at play here beyond simply "X is good enough". But sure, the more that dominant languages try to pick up good features from other, better languages, the more they will tend to maintain their dominance. This is the way nearly all successful systems behave, incidentally. Please note that it's going to be tough sledding trying to convince JS users not to try to improve their language so that some other clearly superior language can come along and take its market/mindshare. And, well, yes, I realize we're talking about a future maybe-feature. That said, I assume you're granting my counter-point about how, no matter how you slice it, this is still ultimately "just a babel plugin"?
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > Please note that it's going to be tough sledding trying to convince JS users not to try to improve their language so that some other clearly superior language can come along and take its market/mindshare. My point is that there's no "clearly superior language" compare to JS. Some people want a ML flavor, some people want a C# flavor, some people want a Lisp flavor. I wish people would just use those language and improve the interops instead of putting everything into JS.

Zababa 5y ago

"Switching languages is impossible" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You think you can't, so more stuff get added to the language, so it's less justified to switch, etc. And then you end up with people trying to use immutable structures in JS and having way worse performance (but there's records and tuples coming!). Many people that said that switching languages was impossible happily migrated to Typescript, because the migration was easy. You could do the same with something like ReScript, but instead of getting the codebase more and more strict like with TS, you would transform it more and more into ReScript. There's also often lots of opportunities for small greenfield projects/part of projects. > And as far as I know, this will be in a future version of ECMAscript This may be in a future version of ECMAscript. Stage 4 proposals are the one accepted, stage 3 are almost official. This one is stage 2.

ledauphin 5y ago
It's not _just_ a self-fulfilling prophecy - there are other factors at play here beyond simply "X is good enough". But sure, the more that dominant languages try to pick up good features from other, better languages, the more they will tend to maintain their dominance. This is the way nearly all successful systems behave, incidentally. Please note that it's going to be tough sledding trying to convince JS users not to try to improve their language so that some other clearly superior language can come along and take its market/mindshare. And, well, yes, I realize we're talking about a future maybe-feature. That said, I assume you're granting my counter-point about how, no matter how you slice it, this is still ultimately "just a babel plugin"?
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Please note that it's going to be tough sledding trying to convince JS users not to try to improve their language so that some other clearly superior language can come along and take its market/mindshare. My point is that there's no "clearly superior language" compare to JS. Some people want a ML flavor, some people want a C# flavor, some people want a Lisp flavor. I wish people would just use those language and improve the interops instead of putting everything into JS.