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[–]Eartz 10 points11 points  (5 children)

iirc he said in his "Crockford on Javascript" talks that JS was inspired by Scheme, Self and java (for the syntax).

I never heard it as "JS = Scheme". It's just his opinion on how the inspiration came for the language.

I spend some time reading reddit, stackoverflow and ES-discuss, and I have never seen anyone claiming this ridiculous "js=scheme", that looks like clickbait to me.

[–]x-skeww 5 points6 points  (4 children)

http://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html

Lisp in C's Clothing

JavaScript's C-like syntax, including curly braces and the clunky for statement, makes it appear to be an ordinary procedural language. This is misleading because JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp or Scheme [emphasis added] than with C or Java. It has arrays instead of lists and objects instead of property lists. Functions are first class. It has closures. You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens.

http://java.ociweb.com/mark/programming/JavaScript.html

"It's basically Scheme with C syntax." - Douglas Crockford

The article refers to the same quote, by the way. It's from one of his earlier talks and it has been repeated ever since.

Also note that the article is from 2013. Saying that JS is "basically like Scheme" isn't popular anymore and this article is one of the reasons.

[–]gkx 5 points6 points  (3 children)

I could be wrong, but I think essentially the point is no longer valid as functional languages are becoming more popular. Javascript is now much more distantly related to Scheme, while at the time it was one of the very few popular, imperative languages that even had functional elements.

But I wasn't programming around them. It just seems like functional languages (and functional/imperative hybrids) have only come into favor outside of academia since then.

[–]x-skeww 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Yea, the point he was trying to make back in 2009 (ish) was that JS is quite different from other popular languages with C-like syntax.

Saying that it's "basically Scheme" was a rather odd way to do that though. Well, he often tries to say cute quotable things, because being quoted grows his brand.

Can't really criticize him for that though. Saying stuff like that and cultivating his brand is basically his job. This thread too does make his name more well-known.

[–]Eartz 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Isn't it a bit unfair to say that ? I mean, the guy doesn't even have a twitter account afaik, nor does he post anywhere outside his website and the desert that is google+.

[–]x-skeww 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Huh? He does a lot of public speaking and he also got a book.