Real men don't do JavaScript
Host: Dave Thomas
The mainstream professional developer community has never taken JavaScript seriously but soon they will have no choice. JavaScript is ready to move to center stage as the development and delivery technology for Web 2.x applications. In the past, most enterprise and product developers flocked to Java or C# while web developers moved to PHP, Perl, Python and more recently Ruby, with most ignoring the web based scripting language called JavaScript. At best it has been considered something to spiff up one's HTML pages. To make matters worse, incompatible implementations of JS and the DOM have tormented developers and made JS very unpopular with many. Until Ajax and Web 2.0 Douglas Crockford seemed to be the only advocate for JavaScript as a reasonable programming language. He pointed out that JS was really a Scheme like language with a prototype-based object model layered on top of it.