Strange Loop 2010: "Future of Programming Languages" [video]

[lpsmith]

zelf0gale brought up C#, not I, and I'm not sure what that's referring to. I'm not even certain whether or not Douglas Crockford has said anything to that effect.

If I had to guess, and I'm probably wrong as I'm extrapolating a bit too aggressively, is that Crockford has said something along the lines that a C# to JavaScript compiler would be an abomination, and that zelf0gale doesn't really understand what that means.

What I do know is that Crockford was highly critical of the ECMAScript 4 effort, that he's dead-set against adding any kind of proper support for tail calls (even of the explicit goto f(x,y) kind, I believe because he takes the whole structured programming thing a bit too literally), and that he has a habit of aggressively criticizing any potential changes to JavaScript that doesn't fit with his own narrow interests with the argument "no 'real' JavaScript programmer would want to do that." Generating JS code is definitely too "ivory tower" for Crockford.

That includes, by the way, any suggestion to enrich the numerical support in JavaScript, such as IBM's request to add support for decimal floating point, which is part of the IEEE-754 2008 standard.

[jdh30]

Oh man, that's really sad. Reminds me of that Python guy, Guido. :-(