Okay, I’m a week late hearing the news, but it seems the EcmaScript (aka JavaScript, JScript, etc.) committee has cut its losses, and settled on a less ambitious next version of the standard, ECMAScript Harmony. Packages, namespaces, and early binding are gone. Which kind of leaves Adobe with a problem, as they had started implementing a lot of the ES4 features in ActionScript for Flash/Flex.
Namespaces are, in other languages, an important means of controlling complexity by partitioning the code into well-defined pieces. Maybe it’s not so essential in Jav(ahem) EcmaScript, especially in web browsers, which account for 99% of the current use cases. I think dropping them reduces the chance that EcmaScript will break out into other domains, and I think that’s unfortunate. But I’ll admit, the technical trade-offs involved are beyond my current understanding.
I’d very much like to know how this is going to affect the Tamarin project, though.