Javascript, the Esperanto of the Web.

I just gave the tutorial called Javascript, the programming language of the web at OOPSLA, this coming Sunday. It used to be called "the Esperanto of the Web", but no one seemed to know what that was, so I had to rename it.

If you want to learn good Javascript, there are three books that you need to read. Javascript, the Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford is a really good, really thin book that teaches you all that is worth knowing about the language. The other two books, the Little Schemer, and the Seasoned Schemer, by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman will teach you functional programming using Scheme. The reasons the Schemer books are so good for learning Javascript is that Javascript is more like a dialect of Scheme than it is like a dialect of C.

After reading these books you have a whole new appreciation for Javascript.

Here is one of the most beautiful functions in computer science, the Y-combinator in Javascript.

// The Y Combinator
var Y=function (gen) {
 return function(f) {return f(f)}(
  function(f) {
   return gen(function() {return f(f).apply(null, arguments)})})}

The fact that the Y-combinator can be written i Javascript shows the power and elegance of the language.