Javascript: The Good Parts presentation

A few days ago Douglas Crockford gave a presentation at Google Tech Talks and it has just been published at Google Tech Talks Youtube channel.

Youtube link

Douglas Crockford is one of my personal gurus when it comes to Javascript. Currently at Yahoo, he's the author of JSON data-interchange format, Javascript verifier JSLint and many books on Javascript. He seems to know more about Javascript internal workings than any other person I am aware of.

In this presentation Douglas speaks about some good parts of Javascript:

• lambda
• dynamic objects
• loose typing
• object literals

and mentions its bad parts, like e.g.:

• global variables
• with statement
• semicolon insertion by JS parser
• null, undefined, false and NaN

The talk is full of examples of tricky JS code, he also describes his famous Module pattern for easy creation of objects with private and public properties and methods. You could also learn what semicolon insertion exactly is and why

return
{
 ok: false
};

does something you'd rather not expect. Douglas describes his personal experience with Javascript in his career and talks about works on next version of ECMAScript standard (ES3.1).

Watching the talk he gave is definately a well-spent time for a Javascript developer. If you've never heard of Douglas, check out his webpage for more information and be sure to check out JSLint - it's a tool that verifies pasted Javascript code and warns about poor programming practices used. Like Douglas said - it WILL hurt your feelings badly ;)