Doug Crockford, from "The Yahoo!" (his
words), gave a talk at "The Google" (again, his words) last week. The talk is based on his
recent book of the same name, JavaScript: The Good
Parts. Doug is a, perhaps the, JavaScript guru who has undertaken
responsibility for helping the world's web developers embrace JavaScript and use it
successfully to build clean, fast web applications. He is the creator of JSLint, JSMin, and JSON. (Notice a theme?)
Doug
was hitting on all cylinders. I've heard him deliver this talk before, but this rendition was
off the scale in terms of clarity, humor, and takeaways. He flowed effortlessly from broad
observations to detail-oriented code samples.
He begins with the
observation that JavaScript is one of today's most used languages, so it obviously has gotten
something right. Despite this success, JavaScript has plenty of bad parts: global variables,
semicolon insertion, with and eval, and more. There's confusion with false values. Consider
this example:
'' == 0 0 ==
'0' '' != '0'
In JavaScript, all three
of these statements return true. Doug highlights other traps that are easy to fall into using
for..in, ++, and typeof.
He delivers a clear, concise tutorial on
object-oriented JavaScript and closures. The most satisfying piece to me was his clear
explanation of why right-curlies ("block {" all on the same line) is
the only acceptable style in JavaScript.
Tune in to the video below,
and follow along with the
presentation. It's enjoyable and enlightening. What a great combination. Thanks,
Doug!
