spinor:

abandonmentprobability:

Most of this talk by Gary Bernhardt centers around how unpredictable JavaScript’s type coercion is, except presented in a fashion that makes it funny and not just frustrating. A little humor can take the edge off of using a language where even typeof can’t get it straight sometimes.

I heard that JavaScript was developed in something like two weeks.  It shows.

“The immediate concern at Netscape was it must look like Java.  People have done Algol-like syntaxes for Lisp but I didn’t have time to take a Scheme core so I ended up doing it all directly and that meant I could make the same mistakes that others made. […]

“But I didn’t stick to Scheme and it was because of the rushing.  I had too little time to actually think through some of the consequences of things I was doing.[…]”

From an interview with Brendan Eich.  Most of the problems he actually go into are other stuff, though, like the global object, or not enough lexical binding.