Douglas Crockford

Architect, Yahoo! Inc.

JavaScript & Metaperformance
17 minutes, 8.2mb, recorded 2011-06-15
Douglas Crockford

Historically JavaScript has been associated with weak functioning. According to Douglas Crockford this has to do with prioritizing movement of products to market over quality programming. This meant that fixes and patches became the norm, slowing down effectiveness. JavaScript programs are delivered to the execution site as source code then compiled and executed on a given web site. Crockford's analysis is also that there is not yet an executable format that is secure, highly optimizable and portable but JavaScript's Load-and-Go system accommodates portability, the Internet's most important feature.

Although the names are similar, Java and JavaScript are actually not related. According to Douglas Crockford Java was supposed to be the most successful of all programming languages. Instead it's been a massive fail for several reasons, says Crockford: its security model, lack of portability, and its UI toolkits. Although JavaScript performance is based, in part, on Java it also has elements of other programming languages. This allows the variety of dynamic activity that JavaScript is known for.

Crockford's disdain for benchmarks when it comes to JavaScripting is evident. He sees them as being attracted to the idea of faster processors at the expense of the quality of the user's experience. He sees them as out of touch and out of ideas that actually do provide good metrics of JavaScript performance.


Douglas Crockford, an architect at Yahoo!, is an AJAXWorld regular. A technologist of parts, he has developed office automation systems, done research in games and music at Atari, and been both Director of Technology at Lucasfilm and Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com and the founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is interested in Blissymbolics, a graphical, symbolic language, and is developing a secure programming language.

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