Microsoft was the big bad guy, both hated and feared. And Netscape said, “If you target all of your applications to the browser, the browser can run on all of the operating systems, so you’re no longer dependent on Microsoft.” Fighting Microsoft So Sun had been claiming that if you write to the Java virtual machine, it doesn’t matter what operating system you’re running on, and that means we can be liberated from Microsoft. So Netscape was the browser maker, I don’t know if people still remember them, but they were the first big commercial browser. It was going to be called Moca, and there was a tension between Sun and Netscape. Originally it wasn’t supposed to be called JavaScript. And partly why I thought that was because they were lying about what it was. The first time I saw JavaScript when it was first announced in 1995, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. This is foundational stuff for the web, and Doug is an iconoclast for sure. Today is Douglas Crockford, and he’s going to share the story of JSON and his discovery of JavaScript and its good parts, and his approach for finding a simple way to build software and his battles against XML and against complexity, his battles to say that there’s a better way to build software. I ended up getting good marks on that project, but I’m not sure I ever convinced him about the merit of that approach besides him just saying, “I guess this is how they’re doing things in industry right now.”īut today’s show is about somebody who saw XML and said what my professor was too polite to say: “no, this can’t be it. I wanted to do Enterprise Java Beans, and here he was and I’m in his office and he is trying to figure out the point of it all. Originally, he had wanted me to do something related to search heuristics, but I wanted to do real world stuff. And honestly, I think he was confused about what it was all for.Īnd I tried to explain to him what I had learned online, that it was easier to change and you didn’t have to recompile things, and it was human readable, but machine verifiable and my project worked in everything.

There was XML config for ANT and there was XML for Tomcat deployment and for ORM configuration and XML described how the services communicated and there were schemas that validated the XML. It was written in Java, but really it was written in XML.

This was in 2004, and my project was Enterprise Java Beans. I remember being in his office and going over the code I was working on and showing him all I’d written and being so proud. It was a semester long, self-directed class, and it was one-on-one with my advisor, my professor. I remember a final project in university and undergrad that I worked on. Each episode is the story of a piece of software being built. Hi, this is CoRecursive and I’m Adam Gordon Bell.

The good parts by douglas crockford