There are probably few among us who would argue with the following statement: Javascript is an aging language badly in need of modernization. To that end, developers and industry folks have been hard at work on ECMAScript 4, the next-generation JavaScript dialect. While that’s certainly good news in and of itself, there are a number of different cooks in this kitchen, with differing views of what direction ECMAScript 4 should take. On one side, there’s Microsoft and Yahoo, both of who argue that increasing the complexity of the existing language is not the right way to go–they believe that the focus should remain on improving ECMAScript 3 and that modern scripting functionality should be provided by a totally different language. On the other side we’ve got folks like Mozilla and Adobe, who think that ECMAScript needs a full overhaul, while preserving backward-compatibility with old code. Is there a way forward? Ars Technica thinks that there might be: a solution that bridges the gap between the two camps.

For more on the Javascript war:
– see this Ars Technica article