Seibel: So you actually ended up doing your degree in broadcasting; after that what did you do?

Crockford: I started a master’s program in educational technology. But I felt like I was so far ahead of where the program was that I was just wasting time. I left that after about a year and went to work at SRI in Menlo Park, as a researcher. Then I went to a company called Basic Four, which was making small business minicomputers and spent a lot of years there. I developed a word-processing system for them and started doing some research into portable machines and PCs. I tried to push that company into PCs; I bought the first PC in the company and left it open on my desk so that the engineers could come look at it and see what IBM had done, but ultimately I couldn’t change the culture there—they were pretty set in what they were doing.

Then one Christmas, maybe it was Christmas of ’81, I bought an Atari 800. I went to the computer store and there was an Apple II and an 800 and the 800 looked to be snazzier so I got that one. I thought that I’d write a word processor on it or a programming language for it. But the 6502 was just not up to doing anything. So I’d spent two thousand dollars for the thing—what can it do? Well, obviously it can do games. So I started writing computer games and I sold one to Atari and then got an offer to work in their research laboratory in Sunnyvale. That was the research lab that Alan Kay had started, his first thing since PARC. So I went there and it was great. I was there for two years and watched the company melt down. But I managed to do some interesting work there. Worked with some really good people.

Seibel: Had you ever been a game aficionado before that?

Crockford: I’d thrown some quarters at Space Invaders and Pac-Man. I liked the games; I wasn’t hard-core. The interesting thing about games for me was it was another place where television interacted with computers. It was the first place where the public got to participate in that interaction. I thought that was really interesting.

Seibel: After Atari melted down, what next?

Crockford: Then I went to Lucasfilm and was there for eight years.

Seibel: And Habitat started while you were there.

Crockford: It sure did. A friend of mine, Chip Morningstar, started that project. He invented the avatar; he invented the graphical virtual world. He did all that stuff first. It ran on Commodore 64s and off-peak x25 networks. Just amazing foresight in the design of that thing—he got so much right, it was amazing. I was sort of a spectator. I saw them doing it and encouraged them. But I can’t take any credit for what they did.

Seibel: And then you went with them to found Electric Communities, which built upon those ideas?

Crockford: Right. Morningstar and Randy Farmer left Lucasfilm to start a company called the American Information Exchange, which took their idea of a social server and applied it to the idea of online markets. Brilliant idea, but ahead of their time. Had they been a little bit later, they could have been eBay.

Then we got the idea of well, let’s do that again and come up with a common platform which does the entertainment thing and the social thing and the business thing and the commercial thing and everything and we’ll do the platform for the whole world. And we had some ideas about how to make it fully distributed so that there is no single server—that it all spreads over the Net. And we would come up with security models that would allow it to be fully decentralized. It was a really powerful idea and that was the idea behind Electric Communities.

Seibel: And that’s where the first versions of E came from.

Crockford: Right. We needed a secure programming language to develop the platform and the applications in. And our first attempt at that was something called Joule which was being developed at another company called Agorics. Joule was an actor language and was pretty odd in the way that it did things—it was brilliant but unconventional.

We had concerns about Joule. Were we going to be able to get people to use this language; is it too freaky? Then we came up with the idea of E, which was taking the core actor concepts out of Joule and reimplementing them on top of Java.

Seibel: Did E ever have any adoption by anyone other than its inventors?

Crockford: Not the original language. The old E was a Java dialect. We had all sorts of problems with Sun about that. We then came up with an E scripting language that was lighter but had similar properties. And that is the language which is now called E.

We developed that language at Electric Communities but I don’t think we ever made use of it. But at one point we decided that we weren’t using it, but it was good stuff so we spun it out and I’m really happy to see that it survived.

One of the things that was good for me in being at Electric Communities is it taught me to think in terms of closures. So when I started doing web stuff I looked at JavaScript and said, “There’s something familiar about this.” Because a lot of JavaScript’s heritage comes from Scheme but you look at the documentation and there’s nothing there that tells you that there are closures in the language. So I kind of discovered it by accident and went, “Whoa! This is great.” And I’ve been promoting that idea that you can actually do serious programming in this silly little language.

Seibel: So that sort of brings us to the recent controversy about ECMAScript 4. I gather that you like the simplicity of the ES3 version of JavaScript.

Crockford: Well, ultimately, the significance of the changes you can make to a language is related to the success of the language. The more successful the language is, the greater the cost of changing it. You have greater reeducation costs and you have the potential costs of disruption which, as you become bigger, become unacceptable. When you’re really successful, you need to be extremely cautious in any changes that you make. Whereas if you haven’t made it yet, you have a lot more freedom in changing it around.

JavaScript, purely by accident, has become the most popular programming language in the world. There are more JavaScript processors in the world than any other language by far. And for all of its problems with its security model, JavaScript is the only language where you can write code and run it on any machine.

And if that weren’t enough, it’s now being embedded in a lot of applications. Most of the Adobe applications have JavaScript in them so you can script them locally. And other applications as well. So it’s become hugely popular.

The problem with the language is that it was rushed to market way too fast and standardized way too fast. So most of its defects are not in the current implementations—they are in the specification. The standard says do this incorrectly. Which is appalling. But that’s the state of it. It got frozen in 1999 and then should have gone into neglect and died. But instead, by accident, Ajax happened and suddenly it’s the world’s most important programming language.

So now we’re thinking that we need to fix it. But the time to have fixed it should have been in 2000. But it didn’t get fixed then, back when everyone was paying no attention to it. Now it’s huge.

There’s another thing that’s odd about JavaScript in the web context: If you’re doing a server application or a desktop application or an embedded application, you get to choose not only the language but which specific compiler you’re going to use, which specific runtime you’re going to use. You don’t get that choice in JavaScript. You have to run on everything that’s out there.

Because we have to run on everything, bugs don’t get fixed. If a browser maker ships a bug and goes, “Oops, we screwed up,” and the next month they ship another one, we cannot depend on all of their users doing the upgrade. The mainstream, once they get IE installed on their machine, that’s it; they don’t upgrade. Those bugs stay there for years.