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:

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

[RWRobbo]

quite a few people losing hair in the audience

[mortensjoegren]

@6580006247 Please start by not using an operating system, a web browser and especially stop using youtube, since they have all been made by those programmers you don't like.

[incompatibleTypes]

It is really hard for me to start coding in JavaScript after 5 months with C#.

[fuzzythegreat1]

@6580006247 fine you don't like programmers don't use any kind of language what so ever stop talking because the people who created modern language are programers and the people who created old languages thought like programers. don't use any OS any browser hell don't use any form of anything on the computer and then don't use binary because binary became specified by programers so even a computer could understand it hell the only way to not affiliate with programers is to die so go

[captmcneil]

@jondissed The "code completion" issue for IDE's is really a problem. Crockford is principially right about JavaScript being superior to, let's say, Java or C#. But a language is so flexible, that you can't even write a good IDE for it, it's a bit overdone.

I like to call myself an acceptable/good JS programmer, but every time I wrote some JavaScript code, there is always the nagging doubt, that there is still a typo left and your code just works because the browser corrects so much.

[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.

[JavascriptHacker]













And the ugly .

[4joules]

thanks

[abiezerm]

@RWRobbo LOL

[j3tzer]

I have just started learning javascript from common programming languages and this video make me easier to learn it =)

[evhwolfgang2003]

I love GoogleTalks.  Thanks for posting this. I'm one of those people who learned PHP and though JavaScript would be way too easy to bother. Its not!

[graceoverall]

@6580006247 Who do you think writes the cracks and serials? Erm... oh yeah, PROGRAMMERS!! Thief.