November 2003 archives from

Piotr's R&D blog

By coincidence, I found out yesterday that JavaScript is a real language! It has a prototype-based object system, full closures, and access to some of the most powerful APIs around—HTML and SVG DOMs, anyone? In many ways, it feels like the spiritual successor to Self. If you're a programmer, go read Douglas Crockford's series of articles right now; he explains how and why JavaScript is misunderstood, and in a comfortable 15-minute read introduces all the critical features of the language. (If you're not a programmer, there's about half a million "JavaScript for Dummies" books out there, but they only contribute to the problem by obscuring the real power of the language.)

Now I need to dig deeper and figure out how to best take advantage of this widely-deployed platform (more installs than Java!). It looks like it might be a good fit for capability-based security (it looks awfully close to E), and with SVG it could be a great platform for UI experiments. Of course, the next major revision may well mess it up, and I need to see what atrocities Microsoft perpetrated in transforming it into JScript...