(2022-07-29) JSON Creator Douglas Crockford Interview By Evrone

Evrone: JSON Creator Douglas Crockford Interview. You participated in the “E” programming language development in 1997: Dean Tribble was developing an amazing language called Joule. Doug Barnes figured out a way to plop the best ideas of Joule onto Java, which we called E. Martin Odersky developed the first E compiler. Mark Miller redesigned E, eliminating many of the bad parts of Java. The goal of these languages was to support the development of secure, distributed systems. (E Lang)

The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few advocates for JavaScript. Its cobbling together of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant. I spent a decade trying to correct its flaws. I had a minor success with ES5. But since then, there has been strong interest in further bloating the language instead of making it better... We should be focused on the next language, which should look more like E than like JavaScript.

You spread the idea that developers should read each other's code regularly

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 product. I believe that we should do the same thing in programming. We have a time every morning when the team gets together and reviews all of the code and designs that were developed the previous day. (mob programming, peer review)

It is explicitly scheduling quality into the process

we need better languages. Most of our languages were designed for the paradigm where the entire program is running as a single process in a single machine. That is not the world we live in now. (multi-process)

At the time that jQuery was developed, the Document Object Model was a horrendous mess. It was necessary to have a layer than corrected its mistakes, limitations, and bugs, and improved portability. jQuery did that brilliantly. But since then, better standards were developed

Is it possible that there will be a JavaScript replacement for client-side DOM manipulation in the foreseeable future?

Good luck with that.

I just published A Million And One Random Digits and its sequel, A Million Nines. I am currently working on Lower Mathematics, which is a redesign of Mathematics starting with the foundations of Computer Science: functions and bits. I will not write about JavaScript again, but I am very much looking forward to writing about the next language when it arrives.