Ignore for a moment that a spec exists for ESM and just look at the implementations. The JS modules story would be: * Node.js made a module system. * Webpack made a slightly better but 100% compatible module system. * Browsers made small adjustments to it that broke everyone.
-
Show this thread
-
Replying to @AbolitionOf
The process used to ratify ESM is no longer the process. Even by current TC39 standards this was a mistake.
1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes -
Replying to @mikeal @AbolitionOf
TC39 is ground-zero for a lot of process meta-argument, but this is a pretty bad entry to that pantheon. Sync `require()` was never going to fly on the client, nor were extra lookups for indexes. We learned a(and walked back) these mistakes in '04-'08. Why repeat?
3 replies 0 retweets 11 likes -
Replying to @slightlylate @AbolitionOf
I don’t think there was ever a serious argument made that the browser should adopt a synchronous lookup mechanism for modules. Nor was anyone in the actual Node.js project engaged enough with TC39 to make such an argument.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
As a fly on the wall during that period:
@wycats and@littlecalculist considered Node/browser interop a top priority and tried (to the best of their abilities) to reach out. There was quite a bit of anti-TC39 sentiment at the time, and most feedback was "just use Node modules."4 replies 0 retweets 16 likes -
As I recall, they worked with
@izs quite a bit1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
The anti-TC39 sentiment was never mine. I have had frustrations with it as with most committees, but that’s normal. A vocal minority of node users were assumed by some to speak for the project (1 of my frustrations). However, I believe esm is very good, if still incomplete…
1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes -
Node has dropped the ball with mjs and --experimental-modules, but that ball can still be picked up. The “esm” module is an implementation that does the right thing for both platforms. What’s remaining is to implement top level module identifiers (ie, packages) in a browser…
1 reply 0 retweets 14 likes -
And until then, we’re going to be relying on babel. Which, honestly, is fine, because everyone is using jsx anyway, which requires transpilation.
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes

-
-
Replying to @slightlylate @rwaldron and
Idk what’s sad about that, really. It’s a short todo list, with extremely stable reference implementations already adopted by a majority of the js community. Seems like low hanging fruit, as cowpaths go.
2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes -
Hard fork of both JS and HTML syntax and semantics, sans same grammar. As bad as these ratholes ever go. You'd be better off redesigning regex syntax.
3 replies 0 retweets 6 likes - 26 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
& Web Standards TL; Blink API OWNER
Named PWAs w/
DMs open. Tweets my own; press@google.com for official comms.