I am absolutely planning on forking an old school JavaScript off of the current runtimes. Or at least forking NPM. Not soon, because for now writing ES5 and running it on ES6 runtimes is Good Enough for my current purposes, as I'm still <1.0.0 so nothing really matters. But eventually I'm going to want a separate package space, and a separate language community.
Modern JavaScript is cool, but it loses many of the benefits of old school JS:
- only runs on newer devices
- requires a precompile step
- more language to learn
- confusing concurrency model
- confusing inheritance mechanisms
- no incentive to learn to use closures, callbacks, and prototypes properly
If I was willing to accept all of those things, I would just use a straight up better language, like Rust or Haskell, and get the additional benefits of type checking and deterministic performance.
But I'm not interested in those things. I want a simple run-everywhere language for beginners to get started on. JavaScript used to be that, but modern JavaScript is not that language anymore.
So, I'm going to bring back ES5. Why not. Who's with me?
Modern JavaScript is cool, but it loses many of the benefits of old school JS:
- only runs on newer devices
- requires a precompile step
- more language to learn
- confusing concurrency model
- confusing inheritance mechanisms
- no incentive to learn to use closures, callbacks, and prototypes properly
If I was willing to accept all of those things, I would just use a straight up better language, like Rust or Haskell, and get the additional benefits of type checking and deterministic performance.
But I'm not interested in those things. I want a simple run-everywhere language for beginners to get started on. JavaScript used to be that, but modern JavaScript is not that language anymore.
So, I'm going to bring back ES5. Why not. Who's with me?