InfoQ Homepage Presentations The State and Future of JavaScript
The State and Future of JavaScript
51:10
Summary
Douglas Crockford talks on the history of JavaScript unveiling some of the struggles the Ecma Technical Committee has had in advancing the language over the years, concluding with lessons learned: if one has a great idea he should not tell it to a standardization body but rather do it, a change to a widely used standard is an act of violence, standards are hard, and one cannot please everyone.
Bio
Douglas Crockford is a senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! He has also worked on the computerization of media at Atari, Lucasfilm, and Paramount. He co-founded Electric Communities and was its CEO from 1993 to 2001. He was involved in the development of the programming language E and is the author of "JavaScript: The Good Parts". He is mostly known for creating JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.
Feb 17, 2010
Community comments
Standards are Hard to do!
by Faisal Waris,
Standards are Hard to do!
by Faisal Waris,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
I have been involved in some standard setting processes and it is hard, frustrating work.
Getting people to agree to something in principle is relatively easy but making them agree on the nitty gritty details of a spec is very hard. You can spend hours (days even) on single sentences.
I have a lot of respect for people who do standards work on a regular basis.