A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend TC39, the ECMA technical committee that defines the ECMAScript specification, for the first time. A...
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This is really great. Gone untended to, these sort of things tend to only cater to power users who have been there many times before. That's where you wind up forgetting about 90% of the users who will be interacting with the technology.
Yup, 100%. I'll be honest, I expected standards bodies to be extremely elitist and effectively have an implicit caste system where the opinions of people who have been attending for 10+ years would be the most valid and would override anyone else's opinions.
I've never been more happy to be so entirely wrong. Everyone on the committee was very engaged with the suite of new participants (there were at least 6 of us who were first-timers) and I get any sense of elitism at all. They actually valued the fresh perspectives because they understood the burden of knowledge and appreciate the fresh context from practitioners.
Welcome to TC39 and thanks for sharing your experience.
Regarding "normative". Generally, when we say "normative" in TC39 we mean something that is an actual requirement expressed in a specification. These can be big like "Promises are part of all ECMAScript implementations". To tiny, such as the ordering of specific actions within a single specification algorithm.
Most of the text in TC39's specifications is normative and most of the work of TC39 ultimately leads to decisions about new normative requirements. This includes all of the proposals going through the staged process. Deciding upon normative requirements is so fundamental it is seldom mentioned in that context.
When "normative changes" are explicitly discussed at meetings, this is usually about some very minor change to the specification of some larger feature that is already in the specification. Like swapping the order of algorithm steps or adding (or removing) a required error check. Often such changes are specification bug fixes. Sometimes they are are needed to bring the specification into alignment with what implementations actually have implemented. Regardless, they require TC39 consensus because in some way they change a requirement that will have an observable (put usually minor) impact on implementations and in rare cases could impact real world code.
Ah, thank you for the additional context Allen!
This... makes sense in the context that it was brought up within the meeting. Coming from a place of still trying to grasp the context of "grammar" in the spec: can normative changes happen around grammar as well, or if changes to grammar would be a different kind of change?
Also: I've added a link to your comment and updated the post to reflect the context you've shared. Thank you for taking the time to explain! ❤️
Sure, as "normative" applies to anything that is an actual requirement and the grammar defines the syntax that an implementation is required to recognize.
But while normative grammar issues have occurred in the past, I would expect small bug-fix level normative changes to the grammar to now be quite rare.
Thanks, Tierney, for sharing. I'm just curious:
Thanks for the kind words Eugene! 🙏
To answer your questions:
TC39 meets every 2 months in a location somewhere in the world. For example, this meeting was in NYC (low barrier for me since I live in NYC), but the next one will be in Berlin immediately following JSConf EU.
There are actually a significantly larger number than 63 that you can see – those 63 have just made their membership in the GitHub organization public (GitHub defaults to private, and many developers in general don't know that there's even a toggle for this). There about 3x that many members of the org.
My rough estimate is that there were 50-75 people in the meeting. The meeting spans three days and some people were only able to attend for a day or two, so it's hard for me to assert exactly how many people were there without looking at the attendance sheet.
So the "TC" part is important – it stands for Technical Committee, which is a part of how ECMA International (the body which TC39 is under) is structured. The answer to your question is incredibly simple, as far as I know – TC39 was the 39th TC/TG 😁
You can find a list of all (current?) TCs on the ECMA International website. You might notice a few others that cover areas you recognize, like TC49 and TC52.
Oh nice, this is something new to me. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the detailed reply!
Thanks for sharing Tierney!
Really happy to hear about your experience, seems like it's indeed more welcoming than looks on the outside.
Couple of questions :
Thanks for the questions, Liran ❤️
To answer them:
They were deeply technical but not in a way that I couldn't follow. It was honestly similar to a classroom style presentation, except where everyone wants you to understand and succeed – and one where you can use the Internet to figure out what the heck people are saying. I opened up Google and the spec often when there was a word I didn't understand, and if I couldn't find an answer I just asked someone once we were out of the actual presentation.
The in-person meetings are every two months.
Thanks!
Looking forward to more of your updates from these meetings.
Thanks for the write up Tierney. Nice to get an insider's view of these meetings.
No problem! If there's anything in particular you're interested in about TC39, I'd be happy to try to capture the answers and share them in future posts 💖
Great post! Very well explained! Thanks.
Thank you! 🙏
Awesome post! I’m glad you had a great experience, thanks for sharing
Thank you, and no problem! Hopefully this post gives others a bit more insight into what TC39 is like <3
Thanks for the writeup 👏👏👏
No problem, Simeon! ❤️
Did you take some pics you can probably share ?