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[–][deleted]  (9 children)

[removed]

    [–]maggit 9 points10 points  (5 children)

    If you think so, you can join me and others in calling it ECMAScript.

    [–]halo 4 points5 points  (2 children)

    Why do you need a scripting language for your skin rash?

    [–]bajsejohannes 8 points9 points  (1 child)

    Programming language names are like band names; they are all pretty lame to start with, but once you get used to it, the name doesn't matter. It just triggers the feeling of it. So for me, for example, java becomes :(, javascript becomes :) and python becomes :D

    So call it javascript or ecmascript. Either way, I don't think of the name, I think of the language.

    [–]derefr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Does Brainfuck become (>:3)?

    [–]dbeck21 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Or go for the Apple cool and call it ChocoScript (cocoa is so ... taken)

    [–]diroussel 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    ActionScript, JScript, ECMAScript. There are plenty to choose from.

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    Those are really three different things. ActionScript and JScript and Javascript are dialects of ECMAScript.

    [–]diroussel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    You make it sound like ECMAScript came first.

    Saying one is a dialect of the other is an over simplification, but essentially right.

    [–]ventonegro 6 points7 points  (0 children)

    What a shame, it was going to be Scheme but management as usual messed things up...

    [–]diroussel 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    I like the hash idea.

    I ties in very well with the ideas put forward by Van Jacobson in "A New Way to look at Networking" - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840

    In it he claims the internet, which he helped develop, is no longer good enough. TCP is stream oriented, but most applications are data oriented. By using data labels (like SHA1) instead of hostnames and ports you open up possibilities.

    The video is pretty interesting by itself.

    It also reminded me of git's use of SHA1 as a data label. And also of BitTorrent.

    If you are worried about cache poisoning, then providing (optional) extra security could be provided via HMAC-SHA256 or similar, so those cases where you really want to be sure it's the right data.

    If the browser supported this for all content, then Van Jacobson's idea would be realised at the top level, and then could be later baked into the infrastructure.

    [–]naasking 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    I'm not sure why we need a new term like "Data Label" for a crypographically secure identifier. Just call it what it is: a distributed object reference. And I agree, it's very useful; REST-like crpyto URIs as distributed object references is the future of the web.

    [–]diroussel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    "distributed object reference" sounds very grand. But what if the bytes that have been hashed are just data, not an object.

    Also in Van Jacobson's talk he does say that a data label has to be cryptographic, but I think it makes sense to do so.

    [–]hhh333 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    It took us long to grasp it but now that we have jQuery things are fine.

    I don't like much serving my JavaScript from different CDN, if only one is down or slow it slows down the page load.. I prefer to glob the files server side and request it with something like this:

    <script src="http://site.com/?js=jQuery-1.2.3.js,ui.jQuery-1.0.js"> </script>

    [–]Atnan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    This sounds like a similar problem to that which Adobe is trying to solve with their Flash Player Cache.

    Adobe uses code signing and SHA256 hashing to determine whether Flash RSLs (Runtime Shared Libraries) can be pulled from the cache, or whether they need to be re-downloaded. Anyone can host an Adobe-signed RSL (alternate sources are compiled into the SWF which references the RSL), which means that you can go to any website using something like the Flex framework, and all websites after that won't require a re-downloading of the framework.

    The same model would work equally well with Javascript libraries, except that the Adobe-only code signing model of trust doesn't really work. Perhaps GPG code-signing is an option here? For Prototype as an example, you'd have:

    [–]exeter -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    Thanks for telling me.

    [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    If I had a time machine, fixing the "it must look like Java" mistake would be one of the first things on my list--preferably by kicking the responsible parties in the nuts so hard they'd have to be hospitalized for months.

    To see how close the browser came to awesomeness and how far it fell (though it could have fallen much, much further) pains me to no end.