I had a blast at South by Southwest this year. It was great to catch up with old friends and meet new ones.
Amongst the JavaScript names that I was able to put faces to were John Resig and Andrew DuPont. Together with Dori Smith, Jonathan Snook, Dan Webb, Aaron Gustafson, Cameron Adams, Derek Featherstone and PPK, we took time out one lunchtime to have a little chat about JavaScript over some barbeque at the Iron Works. Geekery and ribs: what more could you ask for? (well, you could ask for Simon Willison, Dean Edwards, James Edwards and Stuart Langridge but they couldn’t make it to Austin this year)
Sitting at a table with some of the finest JavaScript minds of our time, it struck me that the language is in pretty good shape. I remember another meetup two years ago after the first @media conference in London. At that time, it really looked like we had our work cut out for us: JavaScript was shunned, it had a bad reputation and its rehabilition seemed like a sysiphean task. Two years on, the situation has changed.
There’s no reason to get complacent of course. There are still plenty of outdated resources and bad practices out there in the wild. But overall, the state of DOM Scripting today is pretty good.
As a barometer of change, just take a look at the schedule for this year’s SXSW compared to the schedule two years ago when there was a grand total of zero JavaScript-related panels. I think things are looking up.
Posted by Jeremy on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 10:30pm
Comments
Bah! I need to get out more. Ribs you say?
# Posted by Dean Edwards on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 11:11pm
Huge piles of ribs. With side stuff.
Americans would probably feel it was a subsistence diet, but personally I found all that meat a bit daunting at noon and opted for a sausage (which was excellent, BTW).
Nothing beats a good hunk of meat in the middle of the day. It was a pleasure to share the table with fellow JavaScript luminaries.
# Posted by Jonathan Snook on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 5:49am
JavaScript begins to lose the force (my opinion). It is needed anymore to know Ajax.
You and a lot of other people have done some great work pushing JavaScript over the past few years. I’m not afraid to say like many others I shunned it too. Shows you what I know. Well done fellas, you deserve those spare ribs!
# Posted by Steve Tucker on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 12:37am
Sorry. Comments are closed.