Recently, I've been more interested in Javascript than I have been in a long time. However, after reading some of proposed features for Javascript 2, I feel like I'm watching a simple language with a few warts turn into a bloated C++.
From the proposal, I get the distinct impression that the committee designing Javascript 2 has some contempt for prototypical inheritance and dynamic typing. The proposal includes support for packages, classes, static typing etc. All things that appear to come straight from Java and other enterprise-y languages that I find are slow to develop in. Thankfully, it will be optionally typed, meaning you don't have to statically type your variables unless you want to. I haven't decided which side of the fence I fall on in terms of that debate yet, but I do feel like it statically typed languages can feel like a straight jacket from time to time.
All in all, the changes are way too much, way too quickly. For starters, all of the major browsers will need to support this new, hugely unproven language right out the gate. Undoubtedly there will be mistakes made in implementations, if they are even implemented at all. No one from the Web Development community will be able to use Javascript 2 at all being that it's so vastly different from Javascript 1.x and there is still a need to support older browsers for their applications.
You simply cannot force the sort of change this new language spec imposes in one go. It may as well be a new language for all the changes it includes. I believe, a more fruitful approach to moving Javascript 1.x to where this committee thinks it should go would be to incrementally add these changes to the existing language. I couldn't tell you where to start, as I'm fairly happy the current language, but I'm sure the community as a whole will be able to give feedback to the language designers in terms of what features are actually needed as opposed to what the designers think is needed.
In the end, if the committee goes forth with this specification for Javascript 2 it will be a long, hard, bumpy road to get stable, completely implementations in the browsers that are actually being used. Perhaps, more effort should be spent tackling the issues around the same-origin policy instead of giving new features that we can't possibly use for another 5 years.
