Keep Betting on JavaScript




Brendan Eich’s famous quip, ‘Always Bet On JavaScript’, revels in JS’s history of naysayers predicting that we’d eventually reach a point where JS couldn’t grow to meet the demands of modern development; it turns out those have always been bad bets.
It’s safe to say JS is no longer trying to prove itself. It has arrived. Even if it was once a ‘dumb kid brother’ to something like Java, it’s now fully a first class citizen in the programming language ecosystem. JS is certainly not the only dominant language or the ‘best tool’ for every situation. But increasingly, most tech stacks have it as a central part of their strategy.

We’ll look forward at the bets we continue placing on JS and the web, by first looking back at how far we’ve come and what those steps looked like. From these lessons, we can gaze into the distance and see what the path ahead may look like.

EVENT:

JSCamp Barcelona 2018

SPEAKER:

Kyle Simpson

PERMISSIONS:

Original video was published with the Ⓒ Licence: CC BY-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode

CREDITS / ATTRIBUTION:

Original video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDLQA6lQSFg

Original source


28 responses to “Keep Betting on JavaScript”

  1. Interesting thoughts, and something I've been thinking of for a while. I'm working in a company where they want to focus more on Angular and TypeScript, and less on how JavaScript really works..

  2. As for the typed arrays, I literally spent 30 days 12+hours a day, no days off designing my first ever Angular app that ran on Electron and used NodeJS's filesystem ability to open up an old game save file and work on the raw bits and bytes of it pretty much living in typed arrays the entire time ~_^ there are plenty of uses for them outside of frameworks and specialized edge cases ~_^

  3. I'd rather not bet on JS. It has literally the ugliest syntax I've seen in my entire life. Reading JS is like trying to read piglatin written in Elvish characters. And this is coming from someone who has been coding for over a decade.

  4. Great talk Kyle. Very good point about the divergence of the human vs machine paths.
    Is obfuscation a driver here? Do some developers fear plagiarism of their code (via View Source)?
    Certainly for new web developers today, even visiting many of the large web sites present incredibly sophisticated and obfuscated code, even when developers are able to use the browser debugger tools. I agree that the barrier to entry for new developers is getting higher, and this presents a potentially very severe future economic problem for the software industry.

  5. TC39 is a degrading force of JS right now.
    `export default`, `import from` instead of `from import`, proposal-private-fields catashtrophe, proposal-bind-operator killing.
    They failed to deliever types-proposal and now dance around both Typescript and Flow to keep their syntaxes js-compliant and continue to make super weird syntax decisions.

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