Celebrating JavaScript: From Ridicule to Web Dominance

Although the process is warming up extremely slowly, Fu believes that things are headed in the right direction.

TFD – Dive into the fascinating evolution of JavaScript, from being ridiculed to emerging as the dominant programming language of the web. Join us as we explore its pivotal role in modern web development and celebrate its journey from scorn to prominence.

Lex Fridman has done many long interviews on his popular podcast. Even so, the episode with the legendary programmer John Carmack has an unhinged director’s-cut feel to it. Over five hours, Carmack dishes on everything from vector operations to Doom. But it’s something Fridman says, offhand, that really justifies the extended run time: “I think that if we’re living in a simulation, it’s written in JavaScript.”

To recap: The “dynamic” aspect of static web pages is provided by JavaScript. Without it, the internet would resemble nothing more than a dark, lifeless, after-hours arcade. These days, the language is used in both front- and backend development for a whole host of mobile platforms and apps, including Slack and Discord. And the main thing to understand about it, in the context of Fridman’s nerdy koan, is this: For any self-respecting programmer, admitting to actually liking JavaScript is something of a faux pas—much like an art-house filmmaker confessing to Marvel fandom.

This may be related to the fact that JavaScript was developed in less than ten days, which is less time than it takes to make a jar of kombucha at home. In 1995, Netscape hired a programmer named Brendan Eich to create a language to embed in its browser, Netscape Navigator. Originally called LiveScript, the language was renamed JavaScript to piggyback on the hype around an unrelated language called Java, which had been introduced earlier that year. (Asked the difference between Java and JavaScript, a programmer is likely to joke: “Java is to JavaScript what car is to carpet.”) To this day, few people consider JavaScript a particularly well-designed language, least of all Eich. “I perpetrated JavaScript in 1995,” he once said, “and I’ve been making up for

When Fridman says JavaScript runs the world, in other words, what he means is that our world is, like the underlying source code, massively screwed up and incomprehensible. It’s the equivalent of pronouncing, with a sigh, that considering the sorry state of the planet, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must have been written in Comic Sans.

At this point, I should confess that while JavaScript is not my favorite language, I like it. Adore it, in fact. So I can’t help but feel a flare of disapproval whenever a certain fraternity of programmers polemicizes against it. Often they focus on flaws that were dealt with years ago. To dwell on JavaScript’s original shortcomings is to overlook the fact that any piece of software—and every programming language is, in essence, a suite of software—is amenable to revision and improvement.

The main complaint against JavaScript is its slowness. While there is some broad truth to this, it is legally incorrect to argue that one language is “slower” than another. The performance of a language depends not only on the language itself but also on the caliber of its run-time environment—the setting in which the code is executed—and its compiler, which translates source code into a machine-readable format. Put differently, uncompiled code is akin to an uncast magic spell. Much as the potency of a spell depends on the caster, languages deemed “faster” but executed with crappy compilers could perform not much better than “slow” languages.

Furthermore, enormous developments in software engineering and industry-wide initiatives helped rescue JavaScript from its awful state. “The systems that make JavaScript run as fast as it does right now are kind of miracles of modern engineering in many ways,” says Carmack in the same episode. A prime example is the Google Chrome team’s V8 JavaScript engine, which compiles JavaScript “just in time,” significantly boosting its performance.

If there were an equation to calculate the overall utility of a programming language, I’d bet the vibrancy of the language’s ecosystem would be an exponential variable that dominates the other linear terms. This is to say, no well-designed language is useful on its own without useful libraries. But when backed by a healthy community of developers, as is the case with JavaScript, even a modest language becomes supremely effective. (Python dominates scientific computing for similar reasons.) JavaScript is also an easy language, and by that I don’t imply any insult. Learnability is a killer feature.

JavaScript has been through several revisions. The development of the language is steered by the rather unremarkably named Technical Committee 39 under a Geneva-based standards organization called Ecma International. (Imagine an international committee that could decide once and for all whether the past participle of get is got or gotten, and you have some sense of what TC39 does.) While some languages are governed by a conclave of experts, the process for JavaScript provides more visibility. Proposals and meeting notes are publicly available on GitHub. Meetings, once routinely held in the San Francisco Bay Area, have expanded to other places such as Bergen, Galicia, and Tokyo, as if to resist the notion that the tech industry can be metonymized by Silicon Valley. In some ways, JavaScript

In a blog post titled “The Subjective Experience of Coding in Different Programming Languages,” the tech blogger Matt Webb explores the concept of “code synesthesia”: how coding in different languages can offer a “visceral, kinesthetic” experience. Due to its user-friendly syntax, Python is frequently compared by programmers to writing in plain English when coding. Likewise, reading old C code feels like engaging in the hermeneutics of ancient script, while Coq demands the exactitude of proving mathematical theorems. In this light, coding in JavaScript feels to me like an exercise in stenography—it affords a kind of buoyancy and effortlessness, allowing prototypes to be whipped up in an afternoon. While its namesake Java may be a reliable, muscular language, it lacks the charm and humor of

As near as a worldwide industry census gets, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey is conducted annually, and 2023 was the 11th year in a row that JavaScript was the most widely used language. To be clear, I’m not denying that there are times when vanilla JavaScript can be clumsy. However, I’m attempting to make the case that its prevalence isn’t dishonest or even debatable. In an industry that prides itself on the hacker ethos, calling JavaScript hacky may even be an honorific.

I believe that an apology and a congrats are in order. Look how far you’ve come, JavaScript, hopscotching across different eras of the internet, rising from a laughingstock to the lingua franca of the web. Well done, you ridiculous language. If I am being simulated by you, so be it.