Farewell EcmaScript 4, Adobe are you in deep pain?

According to this email from Brendan Eich the discussions on EcmaScript 4 are over, finalized, ended, dead, buried - you get the picture. Everyone will have to move on and continue to work on EcmaScript 3.1.

For those of you who haven't been following this soap opera here's a quick review: version 4 of the standard was mainly backed by Adobe who wanted to have a proper standard behind its product ActionScript, remember that the language is the main workhorse behind Flash, Flex and threrefore a wealth of derived products. 

But who cares about standards anyway? mostly everyone. Picture a world where TCP is not backed by RFC 793 and to browse the web you don't use HTTP but a protocol developed by, say, AT&T that might be open, well documented and whatever else, but there will never be an official consensus about its use. 

You might say, well there is no standard behind MS Word .doc file format for instance and you would be right, but here we are talking about mindblowingly massive stuff, and that's what Adobe was aiming for, remember the latest addition to the family, AIR that takes ActionScript programming out of the browser cage and into the world of desktop programming.

So now Adobe ended up with a language that's a bit compliant with EcmaScript 3, with some extensions - so it _does no comply_ - after all the effort...

Aaaaanyway, this was supposed to be merely an informative post, much more info about the background of the issue can be found in this blog.