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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

I decided to answer my own question and visit the tc39 website. The lazy answer is that you must be part of a company that is willing to pay ~$70000 to have a voice, and have access to your companies representative to tc39. There are other categories of members (like Mozilla), but here's the short list of "Ordinary members." More info at https://www.ecma-international.org/memento/members.htm

If you are part of one of these companies and interested in this proposal, it'd be super cool to see who you need to talk to to influence this decision.

Facebook

Google

Hitachi

IBM

Intel

Konica Minolta

Microsoft

PayPal

Stripe, Inc.

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It's worth reflecting on why the most popular language in the world has syntax so inflexible that a simple operator like this requires begging some ubercorp for a compiler change. Smalltalk had user-definable binary/infix operators in 1980. They didn't require you to muck around with the compiler at all.

Ironically, JavaScript has the extensibility mechanisms and object-oriented features inspired by Smalltalk that could allow for pretty much the same thing. However, most of the community doesn't seem to even realize that this is a possibility.

It's worth saying that mostly the same companies are building WebAssembly as a solution to this problem.

It's wasm. It could be written in Hindi numerals and unicorn emojis for all I care. So long as llvm can make sense of it.

Really? If you would try to do an effective Smalltalk implementation in WebAssembly, you would immediately see that WebAssembly is making things even much worse.

Yeah! As a hobbyI much around with scheme (mostly), Smalltalk (a couple of times a year) and factor (maintaining some old tools I wrote in it).

The result is that if I whine, I whine about the choice of language, not about how a particular part of a language sucks. Extensibility like that should be built in, and then probably mostly discouraged. If you really need to scratch an itch, you will be able to do so without resorting to what usually ends up as ugly, non-composable hacks.

You can go talk to TC39 delegates in #tc39 on freenode right now (it will be kind of quiet for the next few days though since there is an in-person plenary and people are not looking at IRC as much). We also use https://es.discourse.group/ for async communication.

Also, many entities listed on Ecma's membership page are not there for TC39, and talking to people working for them will not get you anywhere.

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