One of the sessions at Monday's miniSPA conference was Serious JavaScript led by Peter Marks and David Harvey.
I missed the original session at SPA2007, and I was very glad to get a chance to see it second time round. I found it fascinating and alarming.
It was fascinating because the presenters brought out some of JavaScript's real strengths as a development language. One example: JavaScript supports functions as first class objects, which allows smart developers to do all kinds of clever and useful things.
The session was alarming because it showed how seriously JavaScript is marred by arbitrary and counter-intuitive semantics.
Time after time the session leaders asked the audience to predict the results of simple JavaScript expressions. Time after time we predicted incorrectly (and sometimes the presenters did too).
The language seems to have been designed around the principle of most surprise.
People are suggesting that JavaScript is going to be the next big language, and it looks like a fair few people at Google are in that camp, including Steve Yegge. If so, heaven help us all. Power and unpredictability make a very dangerous combination.
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