Software Engineering discussion

This interview, and the next one, make a good point-counterpoint pair. Douglas is all about minimalism, especially when it comes to JavaScript. He advocated against ES4, and prevailed. He is also the creator of JSON, but surprisingly this interview did not have much detail on this topic.

I am not a JavaScript programmer, yet enjoyed reading his views about the strengths and weaknesses of the language, and especially about the deployment issues, given that it has to run on every browser, and how those issues can really constrain the language development. I can also better appreciate how Ajax has driven JavaScript growth and development.

I once has an operating system's professor who said that all computer science problems were solved in MULTICS. Douglas echoes some of this sentiment. More generally, with each generation, there is some reinventing solutions to problems that were solved in the previous generation, because of lack of background in those legacy systems.

It was interesting to recognize Douglas Crockford’s name in Computer Magazine’s Discovering JavaScript Object Notation article after I read the interview with him in this book. Here is the link to video of interview:
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/co... .