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> it helps to know who Brendan Eich is, where he worked when he invented JavaScript, and what Netscape wanted to achieve with it

That may have been relevant 15 years ago, whatever Eich wanted to do with JS, it's been out of his hands for a long time.

And you could also do the reverse and form an opinion about him based on JS :) Might not be very flattering.



You may be crushed to learn that, while I did stop working on standard JS in Sept. 1997 when we finished ES1 (started in Nov. 1996), turning to found Mozilla and then Firefox to restart the browser market, which enabled restarting JS standards at Ecma in 2005, I then led the ES4 effort, forged the Harmony peace between ES3.1 and ES4 factions, and continued to work on the standardized language in committee through 2018 March.

BigInt was my last collaboration (with Daniel Ehrenberg). It's in ES2020 and all the engines now. Don't be bitter!


It's true that he no longer steers the project, but his first version shaped the internet as we use it today. At least one could how a modern version of a similar idea would look like. What has changed since then? Which issues should be fixed? You might end up with Deno or perhaps WebAssembly or something else entirely, but it definitely helps to know the people behind the tools we use every day.




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