I just tripped across a slideshow from a talk by Mozilla's Brendan Eich at XTech 2006 titled JavaScript 2 and the Future Of The Web. Yes, I found it when I was ego searching. Regardless, it's a great talk outlining the future of JavaScript and all the new, great changes we can expect to see come out over the next two years.

I'm curious to see how quickly JavaScript 2 will be adopted by the other browsers, and how quickly web developers will start using it. I'm a bit worried that the web will be 'broken' while we wait for people to upgrade their browsers. Apparently there will be offline tools to convert JavaScript 2 code to work in older browsers. Still, I'm not looking forward to an era of having to test things across an even wider range of browsers.

The new syntax will allow for Object-Oriented coding, closures, iterators and generators to be a lot cleaner and easier, but there's nothing that isn't possible in the current JavaScript using different syntax. Even though I'm looking forward to using this new syntax, I think I'll stick with using the current state of JavaScript for the next few years even if it makes my code a bit longer and messier.