Keep Betting On JS

Brendan Eich's famous quip, "Always bet on JavaScript", revels in JS's history of naysayers predicting that we'd eventually reach a point where JS couldn't grow to meet the demands of modern development; it turns out those have always been bad bets.

It's safe to say JS is no longer trying to prove itself. It has arrived.

But where is it headed, and what does that mean for us?

Transcript

1. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
 --Alan Kay
2. brief history lesson (of American spaceflight) and incomplete! ^ credit: David Hasan
3. Mercury (Atlas) credit: David Hasan
4. Gemini (Titan) credit: David Hasan
5. Apollo (Saturn) credit: David Hasan
6. lots of baby steps credit: David Hasan
7. Brendan Eich
8. Keep Betting On JavaScript Kyle Simpson getify
9. another brief history (of my journey into JavaScript)
16. cheating: Flash
17. $("#menu")
18. flXHR
19. LABjs
22. There, I fixed it for you. "You Don't Know JS" books
23. lots of baby steps
24. totally not a history lesson (of JavaScript the language)
25. ES-early
26. ES1/ES2
27. ES3
28. ES4 (aka ActionScript3)
29. E4X (totally not ES4)
30. ES5
31. ES6 (aka ES2015)
32. ES2016 (aka ES7)
33. ES2017 (aka ES8)
34. ES2018 (aka ES9)
35. ES2019 (aka ES10)
36. ...blah, blah...
37. best progress is incremental
38. place your bets?
41. PWA
42. PWA
43. ...a good bet open collaboration
46. language machine
48. incremental open always good?
49. language
50. code is
 human communication
51. lingua franca
52. multi-paradigm
53. declarative
54. compat
55. not... - slow - sloppy - buggy - inconsistent
56. coming soon to a JavaScript near you ...probably...maybe
57. class fields
58. private fields
59. private methods
60. optional chaining
61. readable numbers
62. BigInt
63. from 10-days to now...
64. machine
65. assembly
66. increased demands
67. Proxy
68. TypedArray/DataView
69. shared memory!?!
70. shared memory!?!
71. shared memory!?!
72. Atomics
74. sourcemaps
75. sourcemaps Problems: - stack traces - watch expressions
76. TypeScript
77. macros
79. Tom Dale tomdale.net/2017/09/compilers- are-the-new-frameworks/
80. experimentation in the wild? yes! eh, not so much :(
81. asm.js
83. WebAssembly
85. language machine a tale of... ...two JavaScripts
86. language machine so far... ...decent bets
87. language machine humans where's your bet?