There has been a lot of good coverage about the announcement that the ECMAScript committee is going to stop working on ECMAScript 4 and instead focus on ECMAScript 3.1. And our developer community is rightly wondering what this means. In a couple of words, not much.

While ActionScript 3 was supposed to be an implementation of the ECMA 4 standard, it’ actually still based on ECMAScript 3 and will now be treated as an extension with some additional functionality. I think in a lot of ways this shows some of the difficulty in working with standards organizations. And Adobe will continue to track the progress of ECMA, but we’re not going to start removing namespaces and packages or changing ActionScript to comply with the “3.1″ version of ECMAScript. I’m sure we’ll have more news or transparency around the next version of ActionScript when it gets close, but we want to add functionality for our developers – not take it away. If anything, this gives us more freedom to incorporate your ideas and thoughts into the language while still being a part of the ECMA committee.

I think Adobe has done a lot of good things to help the evolution of ECMAScript into a powerful language for the web. When dealing with partners and committees, you don’t always get everything you want, but it is definitely in Adobe’s best interest to equip web developers (both JavaScript and ActionScript) with a robust, powerful programming language. We’re still going to work to make that happen.