JavaScript: The Good Parts
Watched Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts” talk, based on his book of the same name. I like Crockford’s work on JSON—or rather, the idea of simple file formats that need simple APIs to work with them. More important, with the continued evolution of processing.js, I’m really optimistic about where things are headed with JavaScript. (You might say I’m feeling a bit hopey changey about it.) I’ve had Crockford’s book in my reading pile for a while and finally got around to watching the talk last week.
I was at Netscape (or maybe at Sun?) when they renamed their “LiveScript” language to “JavaScript” (because Java was the it-language at the time) and I’d avoided it for a long time. His talk points out a series of things to avoid from the JavaScript syntax, in fact I think I enjoyed the explanation of the “Bad Parts” a bit more. By clearing out a few things, the whole starts making more sense. But it’s an interesting discussion for people scratching their head about this incredibly pervasive language found in web browsers, and rapidly becoming more exciting as support for Canvas and WebGL evolve.
