The forgotten developer who saved JavaScript...

0:00 – 2:03

The Dark Ages of JavaScript

Picture this: it's 2009. You're building a web application, and every morning you wake up contemplating a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Not because your life is falling apart, but because you have to write JavaScript for a living. The language was brutal. Brendan Eich had famously designed it in 10 days, and it showed. There were no classes, so if you wanted inheritance, you had to manually attach properties to a hidden object called 'prototype' that every function secretly carried around. The only way to declare a variable was with 'var', which had bizarre scoping rules that hoisted declarations to the top of functions whether you understood what that meant or not. Nobody really knew the difference between '==' and '===', so type coercion happened everywhere, silently breaking things. And to define even a simple function, you had to type out the entire word 'function' every single time, leading to code that looked like a ransom note. But the real pain wasn't just the language itself. Each browser interpreted JavaScript differently. Firefox had shipped support for array methods like map, reduce, and forEach, but Internet Explorer hadn't, which meant you couldn't use them unless you polyfilled them yourself. There was no standard library, no module system, and JavaScript developers were considered 'script kiddies' — massive losers who didn't deserve to feel loved, as the speaker puts it. If you took JavaScript seriously in 2009, you were in the minority, and you were suffering.