10 ms·

Jwz and Brendan Eich discuss the origins of JavaScript (2010)

59 points by sutro 13y ago

userbinator 13y ago
I find it a bit odd that, despite the only numerical type in JS being floating-point, the majority of JS developers still seem to not have any better knowledge of how FP math works than those in other languages where there are integer types.
ceautery 13y ago
I notice OKCupid still uses JavaScript. Just sayin'.
- lmm 13y ago
  Eich does not control the ECMA standard.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    He did wrote pretty much all of JavaScript. They could skip over that part. It's not impossible. They can stick to HTML and CSS.
- phpnode 13y ago
  yes, because theirs was a cheap marketing stunt, rather than a principled stand.
  - ceautery 13y ago
    A cheap marketing stunt would have been to redirect Firefox users to Christian Singles. I won't presume to second-guess OKC's motives, and I'm glad they took some sort of stand for the LGBT community, but I think they ultimately alienated their users.
- zimpenfish 13y ago
  He created Javascript, what, 15 years? before he supported Prop 8. Trying to bring that into the argument is a ridiculous strawman.
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    So was bringing Firefox into the argument, considering he had been CTO the entire time since Prop 8.
    - kzrdude 13y ago
      I'm not very into this discussion, but I don't get how this has turned into something so big. Has California divided into two tribes (from the relatively evenly split referendum) where everyone in one tribe is calling the other tribe bigots? And is that a reasonable way to view the world (now multiple years afterwards)? Edit: I forgot, of course, the big group that didn't vote at all.
      - moron4hire 13y ago
        That seems to be the case. If we're going to start calling for chief officers to resign because they hold views we don't agree with, I'm not sure there would be many companies left unscathed. Certainly half of the NFL and NBA teams would be eviscerated. And who is the "we" who gets to decide what is agreeable? No, I don't agree with the view behind Prop 8, but neither am I comfortable drawing such a line. To me, drawing such a line is equivalent to Prop 8 in the first place.
        lenazegher 13y ago
        Would you feel the same way if he'd donated $1000 to a campaign to outlaw interracial marriage?
        pdpi 13y ago
        Yes. Yes I would. More to the point: If the tables were turned and it had been a pro-gay marriage CEO in a conservative company, we'd all be bitching and moaning about corporate culture suppressing the dissenting opinion. Why aren't we doing so when we don't agree with the dissenting opinion? Mozilla's mission has nothing to do with gay rights, it's all about what the web should look like. Eich's opinion on gay marriage is immaterial to his work as CEO. Now, it just so happen that there's a far few queer and ally Mozillians. If Eich's personal opinion were to extend into company policy about those people (or, in general, if his governance were to massively disagree with the company culture in any way), I'd question his fitness to lead. But coming from a company built on inclusiveness and tolerance, the shitstorm they're making about a member's personal opinions seems quite hypocritical, to be completely honest.
- SEMW 13y ago
  To devil's advocate on behalf of okcupid: I don't see that there's any moral inconsistency about being happy to use something made by someone you consider problematic, while still not wanting that person to have an ongoing position of power. Richard Wagner was an anti-semite. I see nothing contradictory about enjoying his music while also thinking that (if he was still alive) he shouldn't run an organisation of musicians which has Jewish members. (To be clear: I'm not saying I necessarily hold that position wrt Eich, just that contrary to the parent's implication, it isn't a hypocritical position to hold).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - vezzy-fnord 13y ago
    Except they're explicitly urging for Firefox to be boycotted, so they certainly have a bone to pick.
sentenza 13y ago
After seeing the shitstorm on here about the Brendan Eich issue, I was very confused. Now I remember that I have seen this before and feel the need to warn you (Americans) about what (could) be coming out of this: The GPPD-spiral. The German-Pirate-Party-Death-spiral. Many of you might have heared about the Pirate Party, and probably some remeber that, curiously, it was rather successful in Germany. Starting 2009, the number of party members rose (beyond 10.000) and the party started winning seats in regional parliaments. At the time, it was primarily focused on its technology/freedom agenda. Then something weird happened. As the party tried to expand its programatic range beyond technology, many very controversial topics were voted into the program (base-income, de-criminalization of drugs, removal of the incest paragraph). Discussions became very heated between those that wanted the party to firmly anchor itself in the "left" of the political spectrum, and those opposed to such a move. And then they started attacking the elected representatives. Every publically visible person who had done or said something problematic in the past was publically "shitstormed". The half-life of party leaders sank down to months. This caused what is essentially the slow death of the party, since, for much of the time, there were too few people with experience at the top, too few the press could speak too. Americans are more vulnerable to this kind of behaviour, since the separation between professional role and personal acts/views that we have in Europe is missing. French presidents have had mistresses, left their wives, German chancellors have had three failed marriages, or a childless marriage. We had an openly gay foreign minister and ministers who refused to say "god" in their swearing in ceremony. Top American politicians are always married with children church-going Christians, because the populace will not support "personal weaknesses". No separation between person and office. The internet is the ultimate shitstorm-accelerator. If there is no barrier between the private life and the professional life of highly-exposed figures, they will fall like flies. I'm personally an ardent supporter of gay rights issues, but must say that in this case, the collateral damage could well be as bad as in the first cases in the German Pirate Party. Now all the Mozilla employees who want to rise through the ranks must have personal views that conform to public opinion in the USA. I'm strictly anti-gun, so I probably would be "shot down" at some point, were I a leading Mozilla figure. And don't think this will stop if Eich just goes away. Let's all hope that Linus or one of the other (unlike Eich) really important community leaders doesn't have controversial views.
- 13y ago
mkr-hn 13y ago
So does this mean we'll never have supercomputers running simulations with JavaScript?
- pjc50 13y ago
  I don't see how that follows? Lots of fast systems are FP-only.
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    That was a joke. The only other on-topic comment looked lonely.
matt__rose 13y ago
Best Comment? Brendan's house and my nightclub thank us for selling out early and often.

59 points by sutro 13y ago

I find it a bit odd that, despite the only numerical type in JS being floating-point, the majority of JS developers still seem to not have any better knowledge of how FP math works than those in other languages where there are integer types.

ceautery 13y ago

I notice OKCupid still uses JavaScript. Just sayin'.

lmm 13y ago
Eich does not control the ECMA standard.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  He did wrote pretty much all of JavaScript. They could skip over that part. It's not impossible. They can stick to HTML and CSS.
phpnode 13y ago
yes, because theirs was a cheap marketing stunt, rather than a principled stand.
- ceautery 13y ago
  A cheap marketing stunt would have been to redirect Firefox users to Christian Singles. I won't presume to second-guess OKC's motives, and I'm glad they took some sort of stand for the LGBT community, but I think they ultimately alienated their users.
zimpenfish 13y ago
He created Javascript, what, 15 years? before he supported Prop 8. Trying to bring that into the argument is a ridiculous strawman.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  So was bringing Firefox into the argument, considering he had been CTO the entire time since Prop 8.
  - kzrdude 13y ago
    I'm not very into this discussion, but I don't get how this has turned into something so big. Has California divided into two tribes (from the relatively evenly split referendum) where everyone in one tribe is calling the other tribe bigots? And is that a reasonable way to view the world (now multiple years afterwards)? Edit: I forgot, of course, the big group that didn't vote at all.
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      That seems to be the case. If we're going to start calling for chief officers to resign because they hold views we don't agree with, I'm not sure there would be many companies left unscathed. Certainly half of the NFL and NBA teams would be eviscerated. And who is the "we" who gets to decide what is agreeable? No, I don't agree with the view behind Prop 8, but neither am I comfortable drawing such a line. To me, drawing such a line is equivalent to Prop 8 in the first place.
      - lenazegher 13y ago
        Would you feel the same way if he'd donated $1000 to a campaign to outlaw interracial marriage?
        pdpi 13y ago
        Yes. Yes I would. More to the point: If the tables were turned and it had been a pro-gay marriage CEO in a conservative company, we'd all be bitching and moaning about corporate culture suppressing the dissenting opinion. Why aren't we doing so when we don't agree with the dissenting opinion? Mozilla's mission has nothing to do with gay rights, it's all about what the web should look like. Eich's opinion on gay marriage is immaterial to his work as CEO. Now, it just so happen that there's a far few queer and ally Mozillians. If Eich's personal opinion were to extend into company policy about those people (or, in general, if his governance were to massively disagree with the company culture in any way), I'd question his fitness to lead. But coming from a company built on inclusiveness and tolerance, the shitstorm they're making about a member's personal opinions seems quite hypocritical, to be completely honest.
SEMW 13y ago
To devil's advocate on behalf of okcupid: I don't see that there's any moral inconsistency about being happy to use something made by someone you consider problematic, while still not wanting that person to have an ongoing position of power. Richard Wagner was an anti-semite. I see nothing contradictory about enjoying his music while also thinking that (if he was still alive) he shouldn't run an organisation of musicians which has Jewish members. (To be clear: I'm not saying I necessarily hold that position wrt Eich, just that contrary to the parent's implication, it isn't a hypocritical position to hold).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  Except they're explicitly urging for Firefox to be boycotted, so they certainly have a bone to pick.

sentenza 13y ago

After seeing the shitstorm on here about the Brendan Eich issue, I was very confused. Now I remember that I have seen this before and feel the need to warn you (Americans) about what (could) be coming out of this: The GPPD-spiral. The German-Pirate-Party-Death-spiral. Many of you might have heared about the Pirate Party, and probably some remeber that, curiously, it was rather successful in Germany. Starting 2009, the number of party members rose (beyond 10.000) and the party started winning seats in regional parliaments. At the time, it was primarily focused on its technology/freedom agenda. Then something weird happened. As the party tried to expand its programatic range beyond technology, many very controversial topics were voted into the program (base-income, de-criminalization of drugs, removal of the incest paragraph). Discussions became very heated between those that wanted the party to firmly anchor itself in the "left" of the political spectrum, and those opposed to such a move. And then they started attacking the elected representatives. Every publically visible person who had done or said something problematic in the past was publically "shitstormed". The half-life of party leaders sank down to months. This caused what is essentially the slow death of the party, since, for much of the time, there were too few people with experience at the top, too few the press could speak too. Americans are more vulnerable to this kind of behaviour, since the separation between professional role and personal acts/views that we have in Europe is missing. French presidents have had mistresses, left their wives, German chancellors have had three failed marriages, or a childless marriage. We had an openly gay foreign minister and ministers who refused to say "god" in their swearing in ceremony. Top American politicians are always married with children church-going Christians, because the populace will not support "personal weaknesses". No separation between person and office. The internet is the ultimate shitstorm-accelerator. If there is no barrier between the private life and the professional life of highly-exposed figures, they will fall like flies. I'm personally an ardent supporter of gay rights issues, but must say that in this case, the collateral damage could well be as bad as in the first cases in the German Pirate Party. Now all the Mozilla employees who want to rise through the ranks must have personal views that conform to public opinion in the USA. I'm strictly anti-gun, so I probably would be "shot down" at some point, were I a leading Mozilla figure. And don't think this will stop if Eich just goes away. Let's all hope that Linus or one of the other (unlike Eich) really important community leaders doesn't have controversial views.

13y ago

mkr-hn 13y ago

So does this mean we'll never have supercomputers running simulations with JavaScript?

pjc50 13y ago
I don't see how that follows? Lots of fast systems are FP-only.
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  That was a joke. The only other on-topic comment looked lonely.

matt__rose 13y ago

Best Comment? Brendan's house and my nightclub thank us for selling out early and often.