JavaScript: The Good Parts

Google Tech Talks
Web Exponents
presented by Doug Crockford
February 27, 2009

blog post: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/03/doug-crockford-javascript-goo...

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent abomination. This session will expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable and maintainable.


Speaker: Douglas Crockford
Douglas Crockford is a product of our public education system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is interested in Blissymbolics, a graphical, symbolic language. He is developing a secure programming language. He is now an architect at Yahoo! and the world's foremost living authority on JavaScript.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

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• techtalks
• techtalk
• engedu
• talk
• talks
• googletechtalks
• education
• Crockford
• web
• exponents

[aromanstuff]

ROFL! Was anyone else kicking themselves hard when he spoke about how JS is the only language people start using without actually learning it? He fucking nailed me on the head right there! Brilliant.

[jondissed]

In the 'bad' list, he forgot:

- Debugging closures. A call stack full of anonymous functions is a nightmare.

- IDEs all suck because intelligent code completion is impossible.

[sankovicmarko]

0:27:30 Closure

alert(digit_name()(3)); // 'three'

[ItsGravyness]

This guy mentioned HALF OF JAVA SCRIPT as part he won't use anymore because its too dangerous or too risky.

[vincea51]

Interesting channel. I subscribed just to keep it close on my channel to watch. If you care to subscribe to mine it will be appreciated.

[sch3lp]

I feel your pain, but you have to keep in mind that this was posted in 2009. Much has evolved since then, and much in the favor of HTML5 and JavaScript. The question I have now is what JS framework(s) to use. There's about a bajillion out there (look up TodoMVC on google).

[Sharikul]

um

[Jon47]

There are IDEs for Lisp and Scheme too, everybody still uses emacs

[emrahatilkan]

i watched this a couple days ago and now i wanted to use triple equal (===) but did'not work on IE9. So i am back to double equal (==) again. Enough with javascript. It may have good parts but, it has too many bad parts too. Maybe we need something new and powerfull.

[DEdesigns571]

54min into the video he claims HTML5 and JavaScript are going in a bad direction? I have spend months trying to find the right programming language to learn and a book to go with it. I came up with Head First HTML5 Programming. Now after hearing this I am not sure If I should continue reading this book. I dont want to go in a bad direction with this.

[jollyca]

0:32:00 - I spent a few hours debugging this.