Seibel: I’ve noticed a similar thing with languages—PCs were programmed in assembly because even C was too high-level and only now are we getting back to languages with some of the power of languages like Smalltalk and Lisp that existed when PCs came out. I wonder if programmers are as aware of the relatively short history of our field as they could be, or do we keep reinventing the wheel?
Crockford: I think we’re tragically unaware of our history, and I’m often really disappointed to see that people who are now practicing this craft having no intellectual curiosity about where this stuff came from and just assume that some committee got it right and presented them with a set of tools or languages, and all they have to do is use it properly.
There are amazing stories about where this stuff came from, and what influenced what, and who did what, and what is now considered a mistake, and what should be considered a mistake, but hasn’t yet. I think of myself sometimes as an archaeologist of software technology and over the years I’ve accumulated this collection of underappreciated technology, things that I think were really, really good, which are significantly in advance of the state of the art of what we’re doing now. I keep hoping that we will somehow rediscover this stuff and learn to appreciate it and benefit from having done it, but it’s a really slow process. I see folks are really entrenched in the way that things are working right now and it’s really difficult to move.
Seibel: What are some of those technologies?
Crockford: Lisp and Smalltalk, you’ve just mentioned. That’s brilliant stuff, and we’re now finally seeing those ideas being factored into modern languages, so we’re doing a lot of work now in JavaScript and trying to modernize that. It turns out JavaScript already anticipated a bunch of that stuff; it’s got functions which are lexically scoped and first-class, which was brilliant. Now we’re trying to figure out how to get more of the goodness of Smalltalk and Scheme into this language without breaking it. You could argue that we’d be better off if we just threw out everything we’re working on now and go back to Smalltalk and Scheme, and we probably would be better off than we are right now, but that doesn’t appear to be an option.
As we’re getting more and more into mash-ups, we want to have code from all over the place—stuff that we’ll never, ever test with—actually run out in the field. Which is a new kind of programming. We’ve never done that before. I think that’s the future of programming and we’re getting to it in JavaScript first and it’s working here because the language, in spite of all the stuff it got wrong, got this other stuff right.
Looking at where we’ve come on the timeline of programming, we started with machine codes and then we took a leap to symbolic assembly language and then we took a leap to high-level languages and then we took a leap to structured programming and then we took a leap to object-oriented programming. And each of these leaps takes about a human generation.
We’re overdue on the next one. We’ve been at object for a while. You could argue it was Smalltalk-80. You could go back a little bit earlier, but we’ve been sitting on these ideas for a long time.
I think the next leap, we don’t know what the name of it is yet, but I think it’s something related to mash-ups where we can casually take bits of program and put them together and immediately make new programs. We’ve been talking for decades about a model of programming in which we snapped programs together like LEGO and make stuff. That hasn’t happened yet. But I think it is starting to happen now and the place it’s happening is in JavaScript, which is the least likely place.
Seibel: When you’re hiring programmers, how do you recognize the good ones?
Crockford: The approach I’ve taken now is to do a code reading. I invite the candidate to bring in a piece of code he’s really proud of and walk us through it.
Seibel: And what are you looking for?
Crockford: I’m looking for quality of presentation. I want to see what he thinks is something he’s proud of. I want to see evidence that in fact he is the author of the thing that he’s defending. I find that is much more effective than asking them to solve puzzles or trivia questions. I see all that kind of stuff as useless. But how effectively they can communicate, that’s a skill that I’m hiring for.
Seibel: Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers?
Crockford: Yeah, read a lot. There are good books out there. Find the good ones and read those. And if you’re doing web development, find the best sites and look at their code. Although I’m a little reluctant to give that advice yet. Most web developers learned to do web development by doing “view source,” and until fairly recently, most of the source that was out there was very bad. So you had a generation of programmers who were raised on really bad examples, thinking bad code was the way to write.
That’s getting better now, but there’s still so much bad stuff out there that I’m reluctant to give that advice yet.
Seibel: What about advice for someone who’s actually getting a C.S. degree who wants to work as a programmer?
Crockford: I would focus on the communication aspect. Learn to write; learn to read.
My advice to everybody is pretty much the same, to read and write. I generally don’t hire for specific skills. Until very recently, you couldn’t hire good JavaScript programmers. They were extremely rare. There are a lot of really good ones out there now, but that’s a fairly recent thing. So until that happened, I would just hire for quality. Are you a good Java programmer, a good C programmer, or whatever? I don’t care. I just want to know that you know how to put an algorithm together, you understand data structures, and you know how to document it. If you can do that, you should be able to figure out JavaScript.
Seibel: Have you ever had problems with that? People who’ve been successful in one language sometimes have a hard time giving up their old ways, even when working in a new language where they don’t really make sense.
Crockford: I have with, say, Windows programmers. Windows has a number of very complicated APIs and you can spend years just understanding how those APIs work. And that’s pretty much all you do, is you know that one API. You can write a window handle but there’s not much else you can do. I tend not to look for that kind of overspecialization unless I have a really specific niche. Generally, I prefer generalists. I want someone who’s capable of learning any of those APIs but isn’t necessarily skilled in any one.
Seibel: You said earlier that you got into computers because you thought they would make the world a better place.
Crockford: That’s my intention.
Seibel: How’s that working out?
Crockford: For the most part, we’ve done pretty good. I think the world is a better place, although it’s not always moving forward. Looking at, say, international politics over the last ten years, the consolidation of big media and the corrupting effects of that have not been compensated for by the open network. That’s a big disappointment.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a direct consequence of that. That’s really sad. I would like for the network to be doing a better job so that kind of stuff doesn’t happen again. It’s not clear yet what transformations to the network have to occur in order to accomplish that. And maybe it’ll be fine on its own, but I’m more pessimistic. I think we need to figure out the next leap in order to overcome whatever is not working now.
Seibel: Wouldn’t the gazillion bloggers out there say, “Hey, we’re out here blogging about everything and the mainstream media is taking it in the pants.”