Tech

Transcript:

20 years ago, I was advocating for JavaScript. My story was that JavaScript is a much better language than anybody knows and that if we use it properly we can do amazing things about it and it can change the world and in fact, that happened.

But now my evangel is that we should stop using JavaScript. That it has so many congenital defects it really is a smelly language. There's just a lot of crap in it.

And it's still maybe for its field of application the best language in the world for doing that kind of stuff but that's not good enough. We should be moving on to the next generation of languages.

It used to be that we'd get new computer languages about every generation. I started with Fortran and then C and C++ and Java and JavaScript and so on and then it kind of stopped. There are still people developing languages but nobody cares. One person can make a programming language, a really good one, but you can't get adoption for it.

There are lots of terrible mistakes in the way that the web works, in the way our operating systems work, and we can't get new ones. We're just stuck with this crap and they keep piling new features on everything and the new features always create new problems and it doesn't have to be like that. We could be using really clean operating systems with really clean languages and really clean runtimes and doing all this stuff in a much more reliable way. But we don't seem to want to do that.

I've done JavaScript for a generation. It's time for the next thing. And I don't think that should be considered a radical point of view. I think it should be a normal evolutionary view.

I bolded main points

This is typical human behaviour. Build something shit that kind of works. Tell everyone about it and get them to use it. Encounter externalities, scaling issues, etc. Apply bandaid. Achieve critical mass. Oops, too big to fail / sunk cost is too great to switch.

Stuck with it now.exe

He also wrote the best book for JavaScript, JavaScript: The Good Parts.

JS is pretty bad, but it's so ubiquitous now that I don't know if anyone can create a replacement with enough traction for one of the big browsers to start supporting it.

Dude's right about javascript. For his talk about OSes and other languages… I dunno, I think progress is happening there even though he acts like it's not. Rust is picking up steam, on linux at least. OS progress is hard to gauge in the Windowsphere though, especially with MS mostly progressing the malware aspects these days.

Adoption is a feature you can't design.

People don't choose Javascript because it's good.

What happened to Dart?

Always love blaming the tool instead of the hands that use it