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If I remember correctly, early proposals of the ES4 standard had a type system. It was later removed, but ActionScript continued down that path anyway.

Nah, ES4 was far more complex and R&D-y than what AS3 put out. AS3 was basically TypeScript.

For a more complete idea of ES4's type system, see "Evolutionary Programming and Gradual Typing in ES4": http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/evolutionary-programming-...

Dart / TypeScript / Flow are trying to fix the same problems.

Also, I see React with JSX repeating what MXML (AS3) / FXML (JavaFX) did 10 years back.

FXML is only 5 years old, and acts more like HTML than JSX.

Adobe was pushing classes and types in ES4. From what I've heard, Microsoft sabotaged those efforts and Adobe continued on without them...

And now MS is trying to replace JS with Typescript ... the irony. So much time wasted because of petty fighting and stupid egos if anybody remembers what happened around 2006/2007 with ES4. So much stupid people that slowed down Javascript's evolution, and the web in general. MS bears a huge responsibility in this.