This talk was recorded at NDC London in London, England. #ndclondon #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper Attend the next NDC conference near you: https://ndcconferences.com https://ndclondon.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel and learn every day: / @NDC Follow our Social Media! https://www.facebook.com/ndcconferences https://twitter.com/NDC_Conferences https://www.instagram.com/ndc_conferences/ #javascript #programminglanguage #programming JavaScript was famously created in 10 days as a proof-of-concept for Netscape Navigator 2.0. Today it is one of the most-used languages in the world. Some people even like it. In this talk we will chart the path from the dark days before programming languages, through the ups and downs of the early pioneers, all the way to 1995 and the creation of JavaScript. We will meet the giants on whose shoulders Brendan Eich stood, and speculate about what they might think of modern JavaScript. You will learn interesting things about language design (good and bad), computer internals (weird), and committees (just bad). You’ll see FizzBuzz implemented at least a dozen times. It’ll be fun.
ADVERTISEMENT
8:40 Colossus was not turing complete, ENIAC was (expect, technically for the fact that it had limited memory), if Colossus counts as general porpuse then the german Zuse Z3 should be considered the first computer, as it was build earlier, however it was not really turing complete either.
This man's an absolute pleasure to listen to!
I could listen to Mark for hours and never get bored! This talk was so good it's been featured in the latest Tech Talks Weekly issue 🎉 Congrats!
Before Eniac there was ABC (first fully electronic computer) and before Colossus there was Konrad Zuze's machine (first electromechanical computer)
IIRC part of the reason they made Simula is that they were having problems simulating ship-behavior in water where parameters of one ship would affect the other - so you might have a small sailing-ship with some properties from that huge tanker you were simulating last week
First unix was in pdp11 assembler. Then they built C. Multics was in fact quite successful. Large amount of the US dept of defense ran off Multics systems for decades. Many conceps on modern systems came from multics (ring protection, privilege levels..)
I laugh at the idea of monitors matching print sizes. Hey look at the A3 monitor I got. I think A2 is too big and A4 was so last decade.
Could listen to Rendle talk for hours, such a pleasant speaker. And the fact that you learn things while doing so, well that's just a bonus.
6:00 I love that when someone is British he has a name "Alan Turing" but if you are Polish like Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki or Henryk Zygalski you are "some Polish engineers".
TIL the old weird flashy lights are the equivalent of modern RGB leds
It was the Poles, mathematicians not technicians, who built the bombe.
Such a lovely talk. I laughed. I cried. It became a part of me.
Thank you SOOOOO much, Mark. I learn something every time I watch a talk of yours!!!
49:40 Looks like a valid fizzbuzz regex to me.
Why would you ever invent NULL when it’s just as easy to make a Boolean field and set, for example, spouse? to TRUE or FALSE. Also, if they used 36 bits… People forget that RAM was *super expensive* until the 1980s. 36 bits wasn’t arbitrary; it’s was the exact number of bits they needed, where a power of 2 would either be too small (useless) or too large (wasteful).
"Hi Mark, I enjoyed your talk. You mentioned that CONTINUE is used to 'skip the rest' of a DO loop. I studied Fortran back in the 60s, and we were taught that the CONTINUE statement is actually a placeholder—a non-executable statement that provides a label for the end of the DO loop. It doesn't perform any action itself, but rather gives the loop a designated end point. Just a small clarification from an old-timer! Thanks again for the great content." -- Respectful Polite Reply composed by Gemini.
Very, very interesting!!!
This was awesome!
Eli is that you in the audience there? 😄
Ada had exceptions before C++ had them.