Today I finally found time to listen to the Open Web podcasts, put together by Dion Almaer, John Resig and Alex Russell. I’ve listened to the first two episodes of the four published so far.
Episode two [mp3, 63:54] has Brendan Eich and Arun Ranganathan from Mozilla discussing the evolution of JavaScript and the recent announcement of ECMAScript Harmony. It was a really interesting discussion, covering much of the history of type systems in programming languages and the various options considered for the next release of the ECMAScript standard. As well as the theoretical merits of different type systems, they discussed the performance effects and potential compatibility issues with existing prototypical inheritance in JavaScript.
Overall, highly recommended listening for anyone interested in the progression of JavaScript as a language, and curious about what might lay in store for future releases.
