

Crockford on JavaScript - inshane
http://yuiblog.com/crockford/

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pilif
I don't always agree with all of Crockfords opinions (I don't believe the ++
operator to be harmful for example) but I do think that his lectures are
brilliant.

In fact, his previous lectures at yahoo somewhere around 2007ish have
fundamentally changed how I think about JavaScript: what was bad spaghetti
once, became real architecture. What I felt was an ugly language became a cool
language with some warts.

Crockfords lectures began a long process to convert me from "who needs
functional programming" to "why does this method here have side effects?" (a
route many programmers are probably taking, but for me was the beginning of
the journey)

And finally, even if you think that you know all about JS, these lectures are
still very entertaining to watch, because, IMHO, Crockford is a brilliant
speaker.

~~~
stephenr
Agreed - I think he has improved people's perception about JavaScript, but
people who blindly follow what Crockford says are worse than the copy-paste
javascript developers of the late 90s.

I too disagree with him about several things - these two off the top of my
head:

* White space - real tabs are much easier to work with than spaces

* new Operator - a) we can automagically return a new instance if the constructor is called normally and b) even if we couldn't, that's no reason to stop using a major part of OOP.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
The anti-tab movement is not specific to Javascript. Most languages have
adopted this position, and most IDEs expand tabs to spaces by default now.

~~~
aaronharder
But why that pro-space bias? I've always preferred tabs.

~~~
mattmanser
Because different editors handle them wildly differently but spaces are
totally unambiguous.

With spaces there's no sudden, 'woah, what happened there'.

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sagarun
I loved the way he explained closures and IE 6 memory leak problems in event
handling.

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reid
More talks by Crockford, including this series:
<http://yuilibrary.com/theater/douglas-crockford/>

For something completely different, check out Project Future, Crockford's
lecture on Walt Disney's dreams.

Scene 6 from the JS series also has slides and Flash video available:
[http://yuilibrary.com/theater/douglas-crockford/crockford-
lo...](http://yuilibrary.com/theater/douglas-crockford/crockford-loopage/)

~~~
mikeleeorg
To piggy-back off what reid contributed, here is Crockford's website
containing a lot of his essays on JavaScript and a calendar of his past &
upcoming speaking events:

<http://www.crockford.com/>

He's also been active on Google+

<https://plus.google.com/118095276221607585885/posts>

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digamber_kamat
JavaScript is one language where opinions are built not purely based on
technological consideration but also a lot of politics. Best part is no matter
what who think about the language, you don't really have a choice.

Most of the javascript programmers today are merely copy-paste JS programmers
who basically just copy paste some iQuery code and modify to suite their own
project.

A lot of credit goes to Cockford for popularizing Javascript as a core
languages and sensitzinf programmers about the differences it shares with
other programming languages.

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leon_
> world's most popular programming language

I don't even ...

~~~
mwill
In this case popular does not specifically mean well liked, simply widely
used. Consider the mass of people cut and pasting together web sites who touch
javascript, and virtually every modern, internet connected device is capable
of parsing and executing javascript.

Edit: For the record, I personally really like javascript, since exposing
myself to crockfords evangelism and picking up node.js.

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nikcub
Great series, but he 'ummms' way too much and I couldn't help but notice it.

(Edit: it gets better later on)

