Workshop - Javascript: The Good Parts September 24, 2008

Presented by Douglas Crockford

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. It went straight into Netscape Navigator 2 just as it was, and it was very rough. When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the Language of the Web by default.
But JavaScript’s popularity is almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent toy. My intention in this workshop is to expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. I believe that the elegant subset I have carved out is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable, and maintainable.

This course is a survey of the JavaScript Programming Language. Topics will include values, syntax, dynamic objects, prototypal inheritance, augmentation, lambdas, closures, and JSON.

Official Website: http://south08.webdirections.org/?cat=3#post-63