JSConf.ar 2014 | Final Thoughts

So, uh, now we're going to do the Q&A with Andreas and Brendan. Uh, we have five questions selected from your tweets. Uh, so please take a seat here. Cool. This is so exciting. I'm so close to him. I have a fabt loaded with questions.

So, the first one came from a tweet that's I think it's really really interesting. So, Brandon, at what point did you start imagining that JavaScript could one day run and control robots or games within games or zombies in WebGL compiled from C++? I think I think around the time Friends went off the air and I lost my my gig there as Chandler.

Uh no, I I I didn't foresee all that. I I thought um it was going to be a glue language or what some people call a duck tape language, which is really I think not not a meaningful phrase. It was going to be the little you know brother or the sidekick to Java. and Java would do all the applets and components and beans and those would be in your browser and JavaScript would just be how you glued them together. Sort of like Visual Basic was to C++ in Microsoft's Windows

environment at the time. But um Java never really got out of the applet cage. It never loaded quickly. It never learned about the DOM. So I think that that was fatal. Awesome. So basically JavaScript was only going to be for embedding applets. Now it's for reinventing the JVM inside JavaScript. It's pretty awesome. Um, so another thing that comes up a lot is JavaScript to some people has good parts and bad parts and now with all the

SMAScript 6 and 7 innovations and additions, it creates new opportunities for now narrowing down again. Do you foresee that people are going to be creating JavaScript the good parts again now that we get all these new features? I think this is true of the web in general like HTML has bad parts. CSS I think we all know has bad parts. Um the funny thing is people think when you have an evolving system that if a new

requirement comes into the system you have to evolve quickly. That's not how it works in nature. you already have to have had the genetic diversity and and already have evolved to survive the new disease or the new predator. So the same with JavaScript and and HTML and CSS, they're going to have too much in them. They're going to have mistakes. They're going to have things that you can't remove because they already are used by some pages or apps on the web, but they can be deprecated and they can fade away. And so I, you know, I I just

tweeted back earlier before coming on stage. I don't agree with Crockford. He's too prescriptivist for my taste. He says, you know, there are the bad parts you must never use and there are these little good parts that I say you should use. Like the closure pattern against the prototypal pattern. It's too it's too extreme. Um, and JavaScript needed to have more patterns or more strength to it in order to survive for unforeseen circumstances. It needs to keep evolving as it has. So I I think there will

continue to be messy evolution with bad parts. And we won't even know they're bad until later. That's the That's the killer. I don't know if you want to add. Yeah. Hello. I might. Is it off? He has no opinion. Can we Hello. Oh, now it works. All right. Yeah. I think especially the part around removing things being difficult is really true. Um, Brennan's explanation reminded me of a property I found in a