Comment by crabbone

Several unrelated comments:

* In general, whenever I hear "compiler will optimize this", I die a little on the inside. Not even because it's delegating solution of the newly created problem to someone else, but because it creates a disconnect between what the language tells you is possible and what actually is possible. It encourages this kind of multi-layer lie that, in anger, you will have to untangle later, and will be cursing a lot, and will not like the language one bit.

* Capabilities. Back in the days when ActionScript 3 was relevant, there was a big problem of dynamic code sharing. Many services tried to implement module systems in AS3, but the security was not done well. To give you some examples: a gaming portal written in AS3 wants to load games written by programmers who aren't the portal programmers (and could be malicious, i.e. trying to steal data from other programs, or cause them to malfunction etc.) ActionScript (and by extension JavaScript 4) had a concept of namespaces borrowed from XML (so not like in C++), where availability of particular function was, beside other things, governed by whether the caller is allowed to access the namespace. There were some built-in namespaces, like "public", "private", "protected" and "internal" that functioned similar to Java's namesakes. But users were allowed to add any number of custom namespaces. These namespaces could be then shared through a function call in a public namespace. I.e. the caller would have to call the function and supply some kind of a password, and if password matched, the function would return the namespace object, and then the caller could use that namespace object to call the functions in that namespace. I tried to promote this concept in Flex Framework for dealing with module loading, but that never was seriously considered... Also, people universally hated XML namespaces (similar to how people seem to universally hate regular expressions). But, I still think that it could've worked...

* All this talk about "dynamic languages"... I really don't like it when someone creates a bogus category and then says something very general about it. That whole section has no real value.

* A Truly Relation Language -- You mean, like Prolog? I wish more relational databases exposed their content via Prolog(like) language in addition to SQL. I believe it's doable, but very few people seem to want it, and so it's not done.