Javascript: Your New Overlord

In this keynote presentation at JAXConf 2012, Douglas "The JavaScript Guy" Crockford asserts that JavaScript has become the most important programming language in the world.

"The first time I saw JavaScript in 1995 I thought this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I said that. And I was pretty confident that I was right. ... In looking deeply at it I discovered it's got lambdas in it! Suddenly all this potential opened up."

** For many more talks from JAX Conf 2012, head to http://mrkn.co/txtch where we will be posting them as they become available.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Sudeep Makwana]

I love JS ...  thats y i have already Added more than 70 Video of JS in my PlayList ... haha

[George Georgian]

Thanks for the HyperCard reference!! I loved HyperCard.

[anzatzi]

Great presentation. II thought python would fill this role, but js has a priviledged position in the browser world and he web drives everything

[James Bowery]

"No one expected this..." says Crockford. Oh yeah? See the idea future's claim "JSWins" at ideosphere dotcom. Yes, I'll admit I was ahead of my time but in my defense I really didn't expect the US Congress to INCREASE the H-1b program in the midst of a job market crash circa 2000-2003. I thought we might have a hiatus during which some rationality might be recovered from Vinod Khosla's imposition of Java on India as its primary instructional language.

[malilsisbro]

This is so sad that so much effort is spent on fixing and modifying the originally fundamentally broken language :(

[Michael Lockhart]

JS = universal assembly language, i think, to judge by how many other languages compile into it!

That and the fact that, unlike the JVM's classes, JS actually *is* everywhere, not an extra install or a washed down version.

I am motivated by this vid to try one of the languages like CoffeeScript or ClojureScript, which compiles to JS, but I'm not actually motivated to learn JS itself other than it would be a good skill to have for debugging or reverse-engineering, or just for the hack value.

[Noah Glaser]

javascript is really easy to learn, and I love the language. I think one point that he did not go over was that the error messages in javascript suck for beginners. Over all really good presentation. I had no idea about the history of javascript over then it was not java. I really like writing it and I love the fact that I can see my working quickly in it. It is a must have in any web developer's tool kit.

[Marc Cawood]

Not true Doug, we learned to hate JS not because of the DOM but because JS, being loosely typed and uncompiled, is just so fragile. With the advent of JSLint, smarter IDEs and stringent testing we're learning to love it again. Slowly though: it can still bring your site down with one typo...

[rkulla]

Very true. Have you ever worked on a php 5.4 code base that uses a lot of javascript? Holy crap you can't even see the difference. They meet eachother half way and into an unholy mess up for braces and semi-colons. I'll take coffeescript, lispyscript, or any transcompiler over that - and python on the backend.

[rkulla]

I also have to disagree with him that JavaScript is the only language that appeals to everyone from beginners to scientists. Python is very well known to fill that range.