The Tale of Javascript. I mean ECMAScript

[Sysman]

"The brief but puzzling story of the world's most misunderstood programming language and its unlikely rise to power, becoming both the world's most popular programming language and the world's least popular programming language AT THE SAME TIME."

link

Downloads available as MP4 Video, Windows Media Video and Windows Media Video (High)

It looks like it's approximately an hour long.

[NickFitz]

Ah, Douglas Crockford - he's always interesting if a bit cranky.

I was at a conference the other year where both he and Brendan Eich, creator of JS, were speaking. They had a history of disagreement over the effort to develop the ECMAScript 4 spec, and each peppered their talks with numerous digs at the other

Last year, on a discussion panel at @media, he announced that "The web is fundamentally broken. We all know that. The only sensible thing to do is to throw it away and start again."

[d000hg]

I find it somewhat bizarre that while the PC market is busy stretching HTML further and further from what it was invented for in order to deliver desktop apps as web-pages, on the iPhone people are busy creating desktop apps for popular websites.

I know things often go in circles, but simultaneously pushing in both directions at the same time doesn't seem sensible... the more people torture Javascript to do on desktops, the more inadequate mobile devices become for browsing the web.

[VectraMan]

This bit made me laugh:

"[Microsoft] developed the XMLHttpRequest, so that we could have data interchange going back and forth, which was a necessary condition for distributed computing.

Then suddenly, five years later, Jesse James Garret in the shower discovers Ajax, and realises that all those things Microsoft put in there intentionally for the purpose of creating interactive distributed applications could be used for creating interactive distrubuted applications."

Which kind of tells you everything you need to know about the way the internet works.

[NickFitz]

This bit made me laugh:

"[Microsoft] developed the XMLHttpRequest, so that we could have data interchange going back and forth, which was a necessary condition for distributed computing.

Then suddenly, five years later, Jesse James Garret in the shower discovers Ajax, and realises that all those things Microsoft put in there intentionally for the purpose of creating interactive distributed applications could be used for creating interactive distrubuted applications."

Which kind of tells you everything you need to know about the way the internet works.

Indeed

It shows how giving something a simple name can help to popularise it, though. I was writing "Ajax" web apps over four years before Mr Garrett coined the term, but it was only once it had a "cool" name (instead of the utterly misleading and inconsistently capitalised "XMLHttpRequest") that everybody started doing it. Although now people say "Ajax" when they just mean JavaScript

[Zippy]

Indeed

It shows how giving something a simple name can help to popularise it, though. I was writing "Ajax" web apps over four years before Mr Garrett coined the term, but it was only once it had a "cool" name (instead of the utterly misleading and inconsistently capitalised "XMLHttpRequest") that everybody started doing it. Although now people say "Ajax" when they just mean JavaScript

Yep. I had a guy working for me who independently created a framework to improve the efficiency of our apps. It didn't have a groovy name either.