I started with TC39 just over a year ago. The first day that I went, I was completely terrified. I had been told that the committee was aggressive, could be hostile, and has no understanding of the needs of regular devs.
I expected to find a room of people who were entrenched deeply in their world with little patience for those outside - but I didn't. Instead, I found a committee that had been very busy developing a remarkable self-awareness.
I was welcomed to the table for my expertise in date time. I was also welcomed for my experiences. In some ways these have to be with being female, but in most ways, what the committee was glad to have was an application developer who regularly mentored entry level developers.
See, TC39 is super self-aware that most of it's members aren't it's users. They know that they sometimes make odd, compiler-dev choices that make no sense to application developers. They try really hard not to. They have worked to re-tool their process to maximize community.
If you don't know much about standards, than it may surprise you to know that the work TC39 did to get a code of conduct and move work to GitHub was really hard. For every thing that they want to change, they have to get approval from ECMA in one way or another.
The committee works really hard to learn from me. At meetings, it's a regular occurrence for me to be asked 'what would a new developer from a bootcamp think?' I have started putting feature proposals in the teams channel the development team I manage at Microsoft is in.
My wonderful team of new college and bootcamp grads, and ops people turned application devs kicks around language feature proposals with enthusiasm and I report back. Their recommendations and thoughts are taken as seriously as anybody's.
In turn, I had to learn. Most application developers know the concept of 90% case. My first few meetings I felt that the committee was trying way to hard to do 100%. Over time though, I came to realize that code changes but standards live in perpetuity.
You can make changes that cover the 90% case, but not at the exclusion of the 10% - you have to still be able to cover that 10% later. The committee has amazing empathy for the 10% of scenarios that involve older tooling and website owners who don't have the money to rebuild.
As a developer community, we should too. We can go on making newer and cooler tools, but not every business can keep up with the change. The people we hurt when we say 'break the web' are small business owners who paid dearly for that website 8 years ago and can't pay again.
Before you throw shade or get frustrated, listen carefully. Hard problems are frequently not easily reduced, and the open web is one of the hardest problems of them all. Solving it takes our who community, app devs and compiler devs, listening very carefully to each other.
If we as TC39 haven't done a good enough job listening, we're sorry. But we're trying. Come to the table, give us kind, actionable feedback, and we'll try again.
