ECMAScript 5 is an ECMA standard (despite IBM, Intel voting no)

How much of this stuff is coming from real-world need, and how much from ideas about how programming ought to be? I have a strong impression of the latter.

There is a revealing phrase in the blog post linked to elsewhere in this thread (http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-objects-and-properties/): "Property descriptors (and their associated methods) is probably the most important new feature of ECMAScript 5. It gives developers the ability to have fine-grained control of their objects, prevent undesired tinkering, and maintaining a unified web-compatible API." [italics added]

"Undesired tinkering" is the very essence of what made the web the web. These perennial efforts to add restrictions, control, lock-down, etc., seem to me rooted in a failure to understand this. Had these people been in control all along, there would never had been a web in the first place.

Every time I encounter this mentality, I refresh myself by re-reading Adam Bosworth's classic polemic in favor of the simple and sloppy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447086

If you want to read the standard: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

I wonder what this means for Douglas Crockford's "Good parts" subset and JSLint?

Those were islands of sanity and beauty in the ocean of raw sewage aka the browser environment.

In any case, I don't see this as evolutionary nor revolutionary. The benefits are non-existent, the hassles too many to enumerate. This feels like something a jobless and clueless government would do.

The title maybe should say ECMAScript 5 since I think a lot of us won't recognize ES5 as JavaScript.