JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language (2001)

http://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html

by mark_l_watson • 17 years ago

35 34 17 years ago

ryanelkins• 17 years ago

Not a bad little article, although the fact that it is 8 years old should make anyone who would find it useful question how much of this is still completely accurate.

On an somewhat related note, I really hate it when programming articles don't have a date on them. You start reading just to find out it was written so long ago that the version of code it was written for no longer exists and everything is deprecated.

city413• 17 years ago

I hate it when any page on the web doesn't have a date. I wish having created on and modified on dates was a standard somehow.

jacquesm5• 17 years ago

It is a standard, somehow. After all, most if not all webservers will include that information in the headers.

Browsers could easily display it if their designers wanted to implement that. It would be a fairly simple addition to put that in to the statusbar on the right.

I'm not sure if greasemonkey scripts have access to header information but if they do that might be one way to solve this for you.

jonny_noog• 17 years ago

This is actually one of my (few) pet peeves with the 37Signals crowd. I remember reading somewhere (possibly in their Getting Real book) the reasoning behind such design decisions as not including the year on the dates displayed in their web applications. The general reasoning as I remember it was "It doesn't matter."

It doesn't matter until it's 3-4 years later and I'm reading a post on Rails that may or may not actually still be relevant and trying to figure out what Rails version it pertains to. Sure the date doesn't matter so much when the content is new, but particularly when it comes to technical documentation, the date starts to matter more and more as the content ages.

warfangle• 17 years ago

It's still fairly accurate. A cursory read through it (I read it once several years ago) and I don't see anything that needs updating, except maybe the books section. Of course, I haven't read much dead tree documentation for JavaScript, so I can't really comment on that aspect.

Since the article was written, a few things were added that are handy, but not expounded upon in the article: we've gone from 1.4 to 1.8.1, and added some helpful things like array helpers, iterators, and so forth. Not much else has changed, though - for instance, you can and probably always will be able to accidentally save a variable to the global stack if you assign a value to it without declaring it.

TNO• 17 years ago

ES5 strict mode won't allow you to define an undeclared variable.

ThinkWriteMute• 17 years ago

I think the Modula series is the most misunderstood programming language. Perhaps not misunderstood, but the most potential with least use.

(Note: This opinion is probably naive or uneducated)

jacquesm5• 17 years ago

There are lots of candidates for that list:

- occam

- smalltalk

- lisp

- oberon

And that's just the tip of the iceberg of languages that seem to somehow have missed the adoption that they definitely deserved. And, conversely there are plenty of languages that did not 'deserve' the recognition they got.

It's almost like fashion, some stuff makes perfect sense but will never make it, other stuff is pointless and a smash hit.

BerislavLopac• 17 years ago

"Undervalued" is quite different from "misunderstood". Most of the languages you both listed are not quite known even emong programmers; on the other hand, anyone who's evenr dabbled with Web production (and many that just browse) have at least heard of Javascript. Douglas' point is that many people think that they know what Javascript is all about, but they're wrong.

michaelcampbell• 17 years ago

I'll freely admit to being one who didn't "get it" with Javascript back then (and more recently than I'd like to admit).

Not sure I even get it now, but I'm at least aware enough to admit my lack of awareness about some (ok, most) things.

mark_l_watson• 17 years ago

Thanks to whoever added the 2001 date to my submission - I'll remember to do that next time.

The history of Javascript is a history of accidents :-)

Javascript is one language that I wish I new better. I can code in Javascript, but I need references handy to help me remember how to do things. I tend to just remember the basics required to write CouchDB view functions and simple web related tasks. However, nice tools like Rails AJAX helpers, couch-potato (generates CouchDB views from Ruby) and other tools pretty much make it possible to not spend too much time dealing with Javascript.

Regardess of technical merit, Javascript is used on a wide scale and its use will I think keep increasing.

telemachos5• 17 years ago

This may be out of place, and I have no doubt that Douglas Crockford is a genius and an all-around excellent human being. Also, I am pretty firmly in the substance over style camp of web design.

Having said that, I find it pretty hard to accept webpages (in 2009!) that have this for design:

    <body bgcolor=linen> 
    <h1 align=center><font size="+4">JavaScript:</font><br>

Thank god for Readability...

Updates: Yes, by Readability I mean http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ It's an outstanding little mini-app. If you don't know it, try it.

Second, I want to clarify that what I quoted is literall the entire style for the whole page. I find that mind-boggling. (And, yes, I thought of PG's site.)

Finally, the page was written in 2001, so my crack about 2009 isn't quite fair. Still, many people do update their sites.

hyperbovine• 17 years ago

telemachos5• 17 years ago

This is a fair point, but people do update their websites. Some people, some of the time. Still, I'll update my post to note that.

raju• 17 years ago

Ha! I hit the Readability bookmarklet right after clicking on the link on HN and seeing Crockford's site. And I come back to find your comment.

Another example of a genius having a similar site is Peter Norvig - http://norvig.com/

Great content on both sites, and yes, thank god for Readability

pogos• 17 years ago

You should also take a look at sources of paulgraham.com, norvig.com and tlb.org. They all use horrible markup and tables for layout.

The fact that they don't care what their html code looks like should tell us something.

telemachos5• 17 years ago

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "it should tell us something." So, I apologize in advance if the following is a misunderstanding. (For the record, I don't much care about someone's HTML per se. I'm talking about presentation. I'm not being a web standards fanatic, if that's what you meant.)

If you mean that they are all substance and no frills and that that's a good thing (or something along those lines), I would argue that presentation matters. You don't have to follow the latest fashions, but Crockford's site makes it literally hard to read his (excellent) articles. There are no margins. The line spacing is painful. Applying Readability to that page makes the article not just prettier but more substantive (because I can draw the meaning from it more easily).

Giving literally zero thought to the visuals of a webpage is comparable to giving literally zero thought to the order of a presentation or paper. All writing is partly about communicating, and giving no thought to such things is not cool and intellectual. It's likely to be lazy or pretentious.

(One of Giles Bowkett's posts about this page makes an interesting comparison of the visual layout of Hacker News versus that of the Guardian. Found the post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news.... The bit that struck me is this:

> If you are a geek, you are probably consuming information in a less sophisticated structure then your non-geek peers.

I think there's some truth to that, especially in this case.)

Shamiq• 17 years ago

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Is that the script you're referring to?

telemachos5• 17 years ago

Yes. If you haven't tried it, run and do it now. It's one of those "I can't believe nobody thought of this before" moments.

sfk• 17 years ago

This site is perfectly readable. Would you care to let us know since when sites like these are out of fashion on a discussion board with the epithet "Hacker" in its name?

telemachos5• 17 years ago

Obviously this is a matter of taste (and I'm starting to pile up down votes, so I may very well be in the minority).

I can't give you a date, but consider for example the ongoing discussion in the Perl community about the look of PerlMonks, the new Perl blogs site and the updates to the online Perldoc site and the main Perl site.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not talking about decorative fonts or elaborate colorschemes. A webpage with no margins and very tight line-spacing is not in my mind anywhere near perfectly readable.

As far as the hackers thing goes, I've rarely seen a hacker without a preference for a carefully-crafted PS1 (colors and all) or a good Vim/Emacs/TextMate theme. So it's not the case that hackers don't care at all about appearance in all circumstances.

Edit: Here's a good comparison site: http://diveintomark.org/ The layout is dead simple, but the margins, font choice and line spacing make a huge difference.

tyrmored• 17 years ago

I really disliked working with JavaScript until Douglas Crockford told me it was Scheme with C syntax, and then, suddenly, everything made sense and I actually began to enjoy it.

JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language (2001)

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