The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

RIshabh235

We’re past the halfway point of Bernhardt’s 2035 timeline; JavaScript hasn’t died yet, but it’s clearly writing its own eulogy in WebAssembly.

DavidPiper

I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript.

Surac

My first contact with js was trying to make a button change its color on mouseover. There was no css back then. I bought a book and was so put off from the syntax that i never looked back to js from that day on. Never regretted my decision

oakinnagbe

Every few years, we invent a better JavaScript. Then we transpile it to JavaScript.

jdw64

JS became a compilation target (and it really did), and back then in the video it was asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?), but then WebAssembly came along... Seeing it actually being implemented and running natively, it seems his prediction was accurate. I mainly use TypeScript myself, and now with Electron, web technologies are wrapped into desktop apps, so web syntax has even entered computer programs. People say Electron is heavy and not great, but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once. Sometimes insights like that are surprising. The 'death' being discussed here means that JavaScript becomes the substrate, a state where you don't use it directly, but it's everywhere. And that has truly come to pass.

naveen99

interpreted languages carry a lot more context than compiled ones. Sandboxed compiled languages don’t have the context baggage, but come with other parts of the brain dead.

arkadiytehgraet

Regardless of the content, this is one of my most favourite talks ever, especially in the delivery aspect. It served me as an inspiration for quite some time when I had to present anything to a wide audience.

marking-time

"YavaScript" made me smile.

j16sdiz

I skim though it and saw they had something javascript asm.js in kernel.

eranation

Surprised no one mentioned this is the guy who brought us this masterpiece. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and watch it, best 5 minutes of your day guaranteed. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

satvikpendem

The problem is Wasm is not improving nearly as fast as predicted here. We don't have DOM manipulation so we will still need JS regardless as glue code, or just eschew HTML and CSS altogether and render everything on a canvas as Flutter and some Rust GUIs do but that's a shame to lose the feature set of the web.

ksec

Almost everything happened according to the script. Now we are just waiting for another OS fully based on browser technology or WASM OS. webOS and Firefox OS was at least 20 years ahead of its time.

checkthisgot

I think JS, is yet to rise the agents, and using all the next.js components.

jhatemyjob

Great talk. I'm glad he was wrong about this. Having js/wasm be the standard ABI would have been horrible. Obviously he could have never predicted in 2014 that Valve would pour a metric fuckton of resources into improving Wine/Proton, to the point of getting x64 binaries to run on other architectures. But here we are, past the year of the Linux desktop, well on our way to the year of the Linux handset.

thedelanyo

I was actually expecting, typescript takeover.

cbhl

I remember watching Gary Bernhardt give this talk live at the Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) back in 2014. PNaCl had just come out the year prior, and Google was using it to cross-compile, run, and sandbox OpenSSH and RDP clients inside of Chrome and ChromeOS, and the Mozilla/Firefox folks counter-proposed asm.js as a response. At the time I just thought it was funny. Now I find it surprising how much of these ideas ended up sticking around.

devy

Gary Bernhardt's Wat lightning talk [1] was my favorite of all time. It's only 2 years predates this talk in the title. [1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

bpiroman

JavaScript is the greatest programming language of all time.