Optimal Language Design is Hard: A Case Study in ECMAScript (JavaScript) Standardization
Philipp Riemer, Yury V. Nikulin, Ashley Claymore, Mikhail Barash · 2025
In addition to requirements of a purely technical nature, the evolution of widely adopted programming languages is often governed by preferences of individual members---either persons or organizations---of the language maintenance team, who may associate issues with particular design aspects. For example, when adding a new primitive data type to a language, language designers may suggest alternative semantics for equality to existing data types, as well as explicitly specify issues they wish to avoid (such as inconsistent behavior among number-like types). The decision-making process can span over multiple years and can be highly unstructured, and in a dynamic and distributed language design team, the cumulated understanding of previously discussed design alternatives can thus be lost over time.