In defence of Douglas Crockford

So, I have no idea what's going on, but just because this guy could only find these two examples, doesn't mean those are the actual reasons for him being dismissed. In fact, I'd be very surprised if that was the case.

For the record, I've seen Crockford talk... It wasn't offensive, it just wasn't very good. He seemed more interested in calling out business decisions which companies have made that he felt were stupid, than actually talking about anything related to JavaScript. Maybe that's just how his talks go and I didn't realize, but it wasn't what I was expecting.

I've only seen Crockford once in person, years ago [0], and though I never heard of him and his curmudgeonly-approach to JavaScript, I came away with a very favorable impression of him (and JS in general).

So I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, out of sentimentality. At the same time, I know that one speech and/or book is not enough (if anything ever is) to judge whether someone has or hasn't been harmful to people who are not me.

But after reading the original critique on Medium, and the OP's transcription of when Crockford allegedly "slut-shames the audience", I don't feel convinced to have a negative impression of Crockford. I'm not saying that the original complainant isn't justified in their critique or that there isn't more to the story, because I know that things are different in person. But I could also be sympathetic towards the OP's defense of Crockford.

In terms of Nodevember's decision, well, they have different prerogatives when running a conference. And having a speaker who allegedly so openly derides other speakers is definitely something they have to think about in ways that I as an individual do not.

[0] http://original.livestream.com/etsy/video?clipId=pla_1463e54...

edit: One thing I personally find disingenuous about the OP's writeup is their appeal to the dictionary definition of "promiscuous" to defend Crockford. I guess it's just up to people's opinion, but I felt that Crockford was clearly using "promiscuous" in the first sense -- "indiscriminate mingling or association". I've never even heard of the second sense, and very little in Crockford's transcribed statement seems to suggest why "promiscuous" would be the right word to use instead of something like "heterogeneous".

That said, I also don't feel that Crockford's statement was slut-shaming. Saying, "Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web..."

But that's not what he says at all. You could read a sexual connotation to what he says, but the words he use is very much about being indiscriminate about security and identity. He even states that there is a benefit to promiscuity -- "because you could go from one thing to another and discover stuff and start forming relationships" and directly implies there's a tradeoff with the security of commitment.

I thought this wouldn't be an issue in CS; thankfully it only seems to be the Js community -- or at least I hope so. Medium is now becoming less informative on technologies and software into a platform for finger pointing and complaining, which is really depressing imo.

It's happened in Ruby and Python as well—so if you hate it stay away from dynamic web languages with low entry levels.

The folks calling for Crockford to be disinvited weren't complaining about his talk quality, they were complaining about his behavior. And there really isn't much beyond what this blog post mentions that they are complaining about. One person cited a post of his from 9 years ago about weight loss as being evidence of him fat shaming. They also cited a GitHub comment from 4 years ago where he said some code was "stupid". My guess is the campaign against him is rooted in personal animosity.