The story of JavaScript told by Douglas Crockford la Yahoo!
As I am a big fan of Douglas Crockford, the inventor of JSON, several weeks back I’ve found a new series of presentations. The presentations took place in 2010 and can be found on the YUI blog dedicated page: http://yuiblog.com/crockford/.
Why am I a Crockford fan? There were 3 thinks that surprised me on his first presentation I’ve seen:
- he argued fiercely that JavaScript has good parts, but they are not understood,
- said that JavaScript is a functional language, and as such should be taken in order to discover its beauty,
- he was one of the few to write a true programming book for JavaScript and not just a collection of special effects like the majority did at the time.
The series “Crockford on JavaScript” at Yahoo!, is not exactly new but very topical.
What is different about this presentations is that there not completely focused on syntax, language and “good parts”, but rather on the overview picture, all the story of the language, including the storys of the languages that influenced it.
The presentations are quite long, over an hour each, but very interesting in my opinion, especially if you’re a fan of computer history.
Part Three can be a bit more difficult because there are some notions that may seem quite bizarre. But once you get familiar with them, many other things become more clear.