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Interview with Douglas Crockford

evrone.com

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Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#21

Post by bitwize »

binkHN wrote: post #10

I thought this part was rather interesting: > Evrone: You spread the idea that developers should read each other's code regularly… > Douglas: In filmmaking, there is a time in the morning called "dailies", when the previous day's footage is examined. It looks like everyone is just sitting around watching movies and wasting time, but it is critically important in finding problems early and assuring the quality of the…

Plus there's the fact that film casts and crews have a work day that's quite a bit longer than a programmer's typical work day. We have already enough problems with crunch; do we want to make 10-12 hour workdays the norm? Because that's what will happen if you want to maintain current development velocity.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#22

Post by tombert »

koromak wrote: post #18
peanut_worm wrote: post #16

I am surprised he doesn’t like the more recent additions to JavaScript. I liked ES6 features quite a lot.

ES6 is what makes JS bearable to write modern day. Totally don't understand his point here. Who wants endless nested promise chains?

I can't speak for Crockford obviously, but my guess is that all these extra features come at the cost of making the language "bigger". I think part of the reason people liked JS in the early days was (at least if you avoided the attempt at OOP) how simple it was. You basically only had a few core types that were flexible enough to do what you needed, you worked with simple functions that worked on those core types, and you built simple abstractions on top of that.

Obviously this can be a blessing or a curse depending on who's writing the code; it's not terribly hard to write yourself a spaghetti mess of chaos in JS. Callbacks lead to a mess of nested lambdas, promises are better but still a bit clunky, and trying to work within the "few core types" led to the famous "wat" video [1], so these things come in tradeoffs.

Still, I see where Crockford is coming from (at least if I understand his point correctly). My interview language of choice is JavaScript, and I rarely use anything introduced from 2015 or later (except the shorthand function syntax). I like that the core language has basically no bureaucracy, and you can focus on just writing code.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#23

Post by saiojd »

peanut_worm wrote: post #16

I am surprised he doesn’t like the more recent additions to JavaScript. I liked ES6 features quite a lot.

I've always felt there's a disconnect between two groups of people, those who use a language in their day-to-day work and those who approach it more as an object of study (i.e. academics or hobbyists). The latter view bloat as a bad thing, while it's not the biggest concern for the former (who have more pressing problems!). So for Crockford an expanding language definition is catastrophic, but for people writing web apps, if 1 new feature out of 10 very useful then it's still a huge win.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#24

Post by tombert »

tejohnso wrote: post #11

Interesting. I had no idea he had transitioned from promoting Javascript's good parts to calling for its retirement. I started to get a bad feeling when the class keyword became popular, but all of the old good parts are still there.

Yeah, but the problem is that people will still use the new parts too.

I never really liked any of the JS's attempts at OOP, be it the original prototype-based or the newer class-based, but I think that people were sufficiently confused enough by the prototype system that most people didn't bother with it. The class stuff is more approachable, and for some people that can sort of be viewed as a bad thing.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#25

Post by capableweb »

saiojd wrote: post #23
peanut_worm wrote: post #16

I am surprised he doesn’t like the more recent additions to JavaScript. I liked ES6 features quite a lot.

I've always felt there's a disconnect between two groups of people, those who use a language in their day-to-day work and those who approach it more as an object of study (i.e. academics or hobbyists). The latter view bloat as a bad thing, while it's not the biggest concern for the former (who have more pressing problems!). So for Crockford an expanding language definition is catastrophic, but for people writing web…

I'm not a academic nor hobbyist but work professionally with JavaScript for more than 10 years.

I'm also "against" the constant syntactic sugar that gets added with little to no benefits, just leading to JavaScript having a large syntax.

Why introduce "classes" which are just sugar on top of existing syntax? Many examples just like this, where sometimes it feels like JavaScript has changes just to have changes.

Although I'm not gonna complain too much, many of the new features are more than just syntactic sugar and makes my life a lot easier. I just wish they were slightly more conservative I guess.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#26

Post by capableweb »

koromak wrote: post #18
peanut_worm wrote: post #16

I am surprised he doesn’t like the more recent additions to JavaScript. I liked ES6 features quite a lot.

ES6 is what makes JS bearable to write modern day. Totally don't understand his point here. Who wants endless nested promise chains?

> Who wants endless nested promise chains?

Believe it or not, you can actually structure things so it's "flat" looking without async/await (or even without Promises for that matter, but Promises solve other problems too).

Just because someone argues against something like async/await, doesn't mean they want the thing async/await is supposed to address.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#27

Post by capableweb »

rideontime wrote: post #3

Why aren't the links in the body text... links? Really screws with accessibility.

Because they are not actually links (as in `` elements) but they are `` elements (italics) that are formatted differently and also opens a new tab when you click on it.

But they are not common links, which is stupid. Hovering the "link" doesn't display the URL in the browser, right-clicking doesn't understand it's a link (because it's not), you can't open it in a new window as the creator of these "links" didn't consider that behavior (shift+click) and they are not accessible in the least.

TLDR: author re-implemented their own links, with more drawbacks than they could imagine

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#29

Post by the_other »

mikehall314 wrote: post #12
binkHN wrote: post #10

I thought this part was rather interesting: > Evrone: You spread the idea that developers should read each other's code regularly… > Douglas: In filmmaking, there is a time in the morning called "dailies", when the previous day's footage is examined. It looks like everyone is just sitting around watching movies and wasting time, but it is critically important in finding problems early and assuring the quality of the…

We tried this in a team a few years ago, and the problem we faced was developers literally falling asleep during readings. We found that the Team wasn't really engaging with the process and instead just tuned out until it was their turn. That doesn't mean I think Crockford's "Dailies" model is a poor one, it's just one issue to be aware of. Though I often find the same in Scrum teams. Folks aren't listening, they're…

Sounds like a problem with the team more with the process. If they don't care, they wont care.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#30

Post by fio_ini »

God douglas crockford is such a cool guy. Douglas Crockford invented the internet, distributed systems, JSON, dec64, Javascript, E, for loops, and mathematics. Obviously whatever he says goes. When he speaks in an interview a link appears. But in all serious it is time to move away from Javascript. Pretty much every professional javascript developer I worked with in my career doesn't even understand browser Javascript from Nodejs, Typescript, ES6, ES5, imports/exports, commonjs, JSX, and OMG the list goes on... like... forever. Put a fork in it...
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