Keep Betting on JavaScript
summary
History shows incremental wins: ES6 landed huge features all at once and caused fatigue, recent yearly releases add async/await, async generators, BigInt and optional chaining, and optional chaining reaches stage 2. Tools and experiments matter: a dynamic script loader shipped on sites like Twitter, a three‑week rebuild of a Southwest homepage handled ~200 million visits/month, and ASM.js compiles ~1.5M lines of C into JavaScript leading to WebAssembly. The core claim is concrete: keep betting on JavaScript only if the language, tooling and compilation paths preserve human‑writable, backwards‑compatible code.
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chapters (25)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:02American spaceflight
- 6:17The big picture
- 6:33Always bet on JavaScript
- 8:59Building the web
- 12:18Flash
- 13:15jQuery
- 14:40Learning JavaScript
- 16:25Creating incremental steps
- 16:52History of JavaScript
- 23:56Incremental Changes
- 24:23Bad Bets
- 26:38Good Bets
- 27:11The Fork
- 28:44JavaScript
- 31:04Upcoming Features
- 32:35Increased Demand
- 32:58ASMJ
- 34:02Typed arrays
- 35:02Where are we headed
- 35:48TypeScript
- 36:35Tom Dale
- 38:21WebAssembly
- 39:57Serving the Machine
- 41:04Conclusion
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