Javascript

I saw Javascript as a grandchild of Smalltalk but without all the optimizations made possible by thinking explored in Self. This all happened in the midst of browser-wars that made serious client-side nearly pointless.

My kids would find scripts they wanted to use on their pages. I would rewrite these to half their size but chose not to understand the language more fully.

Systematic Javascript programming emerged while I was CTO at AboutUs. My attitude shifted from don't use to must use, largely due to a couple of insistent engineers and one excellent library, jQuery.

I've invested four years so far in federated wiki, a single page Javascript application struggling to find its best expression borrowing from node.js conventions and the services made common through html5. I see an evolution in progress that reminds me of language implementation four decades earlier.

Javascript turns out to be a better host for opinionated frameworks than a language with opinions of its own. This completes a cycle of reincarnation where structure moves from the language in Pascal, to the abstraction in Smalltalk and then finally to the libraries in Javascript.