A Minute With Brendan

Boot To Gecko (B2G)

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:41:35 GMT

Back from JSConf EU and other travels, the minute with team is happy to return with a special episode from Brendan about the new Boot To Gecko (B2G) system. This is targeted to allow users of mobile devices to boot directly to a Gecko based browsing interface and to run web applications. It is really doing some stunning work around the new web APIs and privilege model that all developers should be aware of. Enjoy!

Mobile discussions (more about Mozilla's mission)
Boot to Gecko wiki
JS APIs for cameras, USB, and possibly Near Field Communication (NFC)
HP WebOS
ChromeOS
Brendan discusses the benefit of coop-atition between webkit and gecko, working together and keeping separate is a good thing.
Nitobi

ES6 Lives!

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:55:29 GMT

Brendan goes through the recent happenings at the ECMA TC-39 committee meeting held at Microsoft offices in Redmond, WA. For many, this might be the first peek into what is finalizing as ES6, so be sure to listen through. Luckily with the recent changes, ES6 might take forever to standardize, but prototypes are ready right now for some items! Listen in.

Also, be sure to check out PyCodeConf and DojoConf and help spread the word! It is what allows us to keep minute-ing along.

Past proposal point for ES6
Allen Wirfs-Brock
Destructuring Assignment
let and const
Open issues with Classes
Proxies
Google V8 have an implementation of prototypal proxies (and in spidermonkey)
ES6 is targeting end of 2013
Meeting notes
Microsoft (internal) Survey about compelling items from ES.Next (ES6 and ES5)
Some items had "Meh reactions" :)
Iterators and Generators
Demonstrated at NodeConf

We (Mozilla) Fight For the User

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:57:38 GMT

Hot on the heels of recent announcements from Mozilla about strategy, personnel, and general company changes, Brendan provides us with almost 12 minutes of very deep insight into the future of Mozilla and the web. As a long term citizen of the web, open source, and all that is right with technology, I (Chris Williams) applaud the strides and direction that Mozilla is making and most importantly the courage they have to make them. This is a long and deep episode that revolves around the following 5 points:

Our mission obligates us to make the user sovereign and keep the web open and innovative.
The rise of mobile computing requires new explorations, projects, and products to fulfill our mission. This means new Mozilla modules and activities.
Mobile browsers and apps require always-available (i.e., cloud) services, working with the desktop to create a continuous user experience.
Higher-layer services on the Web today, particularly for mobile, apps and user data or "social", pull away from open / user-as-sovereign toward closed / user-as-product.
So our innovations to advance the mission must expand up the stack, from HTML, CSS, and JS, to mobile, apps, and social, always putting users first and in control.

Where I would normally summarize further, I really encourage you to take a full 12 minute break, listen, and understand this episode. It jumps around from open web app stores, mobile interface/devices, profiteering, growth, anticipating change, and beyond. Well worth your time.

PDF ala JS

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:05:35 GMT

Taking the web by storm, PDF.js is a PDF viewer implementation done entirely in open web technologies by some of the fine folks at Mozilla. Bringing the pixel publishing perfection that is PDF down to the JS layer is something that seems obvious, but has yet to be done - imagine a world without plugins (and all the happy people). Listen on Brendan's take of where it is and most importantly where it is going.

PDF.js
Longer explanation by Andreas Gal
PDF.js Guts
PDF.js IRC chat room
PDF.js wiki
Follow... @andreasgal
Demo
Pure JavaScript PDF Reader
Goal is display PDF in canvas using JavaScript.
Still in process, covering more of the PDF spec.
Demonstrate that it is possible to have an in-Firefox, memory-safe PDF experience.
PDF.js to be fast and cover the most common cases, not replace a full reader, just replace most of its use cases.
Tricks for speed where borrowed from various query libraries.
First in a series of efforts to move plugins into the JS space.
Google NativeClient.

Post JSConf JS.next Overview

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Fri, 20 May 2011 22:53:05 GMT

Fresh off of JSConf and discussing (ES|JS).next before the audience, Brendan drops a bit of insight into what it takes to update a language like JavaScript. Sorry for the delay since last episode, we generally will go into "off-season" around JSConf.

Brendan's JSConf Presentation
TC-39 Committee Upcoming
"Rolling like the W3C and WHATWG with prototyping as they go."
Idea with harmony (next major addition) is to opt in with specification of script type, lack of specific type will yield "same old JavaScript"
use version 6; adds a double layered versioning protection.
Dave Herman
Modules
Lexical Scoping
Global object will not be on the scope chain
Upsides: security enhancements, VM implementation improvements, early error wins
Translation, compilation, and transpilers
Firefox 6 is in nightly channel
Awesome, opt-in, compiles down.

DOM In JavaScript (dom.js)

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:11:45 GMT

Another TC-39 Committee meeting means even more insight into where the JS programming language is heading next (ES-Next). This does send Brendan off on a wild ride with us as passengers for all things upcoming in the language including a peek at WebIDL and a DOM implementation in JavaScript. This is quite a deep look both into the current state of the TC-39 committee as well as where the DOM is heading. Enjoy!

Harmony of My Dreams
Harmony is still moving forward
Harmony Module Proposal
There were mixed ideas about classes that have to fully gel.
"JavaScript is so flexible ... that people can't agree on how to do classes".
If classes aren't quite right, they may be left out.
SHORTER FUNCTION SYNTAX!!
Andreas Gal
dom.js
Early reports show that dom.js might be faster in some parts than native code because you don't have to cross between JS and C++ boundaries.
Rust
DOM NodeList
Airlift into Firefox Next ( in 3 months )
"The DOM is kind of CrazyLand"
"Implementing the DOM JavaScript should make all things saner"
WebIDL
Cameron McCormack
John Resig's env.js

Firefox 4 Launch Day

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 18:56:27 GMT

Brendan dives into the upcoming/recent Firefox 4 release on March 22, 2011. Goes into far more than just what is new, but where it came from and most importantly where it (and the rest of the vendors) are heading and why. Best 11 minutes of your day (12 minutes if you count downloading Firefox 4)

Launch Day March 22
Launch Day Tracker
"A lot of hardware acceleration", this is just the start
No stones, no exaggeration.
Firefox is being built for the future of the web.
Windows XP is Firefox, Chrome, and Opera land.
Mozilla Demos Web o' Wonder
The dream of the 80's alive in Mozilla
Voices From The HTML5 Trenches: Browser Wars IV
Have productive "coopatition" through standards bodies (W3C, etc.).
Håkon Wium Lie
Ian Hixie
David Baron
Dave Hyatt
Nerds + Drinks = HTML5
Yellow Screen of Death
Convergence over gaming
Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) update (crypto nerds rejoice)
FIREFOX 5 IN 3 MONTHS!!!
Discusses the potential splitting despite better features and yet the downside of single source stream.
Mozilla can't convert to webkit, it would take years
SGI and Netscape tried, SGI and Netscape aren't around longer.
Competition is good, different points of view are good, multiple sources are great for browsers.
Firefox is realization of where Mozilla started out heading towards
Keep the feedback coming, its critical!

From all of us at Minute With, Congrats Mozilla!

Do your part, download now and more importantly download it also on someone else's machine!

Why JavaScript Doesn't Have Operators Yet?

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:14:10 GMT

Brendan goes through the discussion of why JavaScript hasn't evolved that much, but more importantly how its evolving moving forward with ES5 and Harmony. Specifically the focus is on operators and the ability to override or extending the language with operator support. If you are looking to the future (and using from Python) much of this discussion will be super exciting for you. Bear in mind that the topics discussed here will not be "available" for a bit of time, but its great to see the language moving forward (and fast).

Quora Question
Pythonic operator support
ES Harmony Value Proxies
Mikeal Rogers
A NaN is not a number, but it is a number, but it isn't.
Henry Baker's Egal Paper
MochiKit
FEAR THE ====
div, mod, divmod
??, ||=, and ??=
Operators for the future!

this Talk

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:44:42 GMT

Any JS developer will tell you that the hardest conversation to have with any other developer is describing the use and meaning of the "this" keyword. Brendan describes where "this" comes from, a hold-over from its C++ and Java lineage to allow functions to also be methods and thus had to have a receiving object and some way to access the receiving object within the function (i.e. "this"). Brendan goes into current uses up to modern ECMAScript specifications, but more importantly the altered use cases in the strict mode of ECMAScript 5 edition. Brendan also presents the future sharp function implementation which will better handle all cases (hopefully).

Don't file bugs against "use strict" unless you really know what you are doing and really test it. Example 1 | Example 2
Update on how #() {} from Harmony Of My Dreams will split out the cases
Hoping to end the Daffy Duck pronoun troubles!

Closure Versus Prototypal Pattern Deathmatch

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:04:59 GMT

Brendan gets a special request from the audience about which is more optimized and why, the Closure pattern espoused by Douglas Crockford, OR the standard JavaScript Prototypal inheritance pattern. A longer (or normal depending on perspective) and more nerdy dive than previous episodes, so prepare to have your mind blown away. Brendan discusses how the compiler can (and does) automatic optimization and caching on the prototypal pattern that is otherwise hard or complex, but more importantly not done, for the closure pattern. 10 minutes in all, but well worth your time - we promise.

Juan Ignacio Dopazo
The Interesting Question
JSFiddle
Doug Crockford
JavaScript: The Good Parts
Closure Object Pattern
Prototypal Inheritance Object Pattern
Prototypal Inheritance with Explicit Function Hoisting
JavaScript Prototype Chain
Inheritance Revisited (MDN)
Polymorphic Inline Caching
JavaScript Closure Pattern
"That Hurts! ... Millions of Millions of Methods"
Chez Scheme
R. Kent Dybvig
"Closure pattern does not win over the prototypal pattern in efficiency"
You shouldn't prematurely optimize!
Note: When writing nested functions, (...) evaluation creates a fresh object which potentially leads to a high cost.
Measure before optimizing, use statistics not "feelings".

The Harmony Of My Dreams

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:48:57 GMT

Realistically, coming up with show notes for this episode is about as tough as keeping Brendan to under 10 minutes. Give it a listen and trace along with the mentioned Harmony Of My Dreams blog post. The notes are more just hot points this week, enjoy the awesome episode!

A new version of the language and it will choke old browsers.
Targeting a polyfill approach for allowing new versions of JavaScript, instead of attribute specification in tags.
IE6 sucks at so much else ... people should just drop IE6 frankly.
typeof null will finally === null and other similar issues will be flagged as early errors (WOO HOO!)
Five finger of fate (incompatible syntax of early error):
1. Thumb: Removing global object from scope chain.
2. Index: Typeof Change: fixing various bugs that make JS wonky.
3. Middle: for-in paren-free and pythonic
4. Ring: Top Secret
5. Pinky: Even More Secret
HTML guys have it easy with their SGML tag deprecation - JavaScript's C-like language syntax makes this near impossible.
So awesome, I think developers will want to do it.

Future Harmony, Today!

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:41:39 GMT

Brendan returns for holidays with a jam packed, 10 minute episode detailing the ever increasing usefulness of Zaphod and Narcissus for rapid prototyping and testing of new, proposed features of the JavaScript language. He also discusses the potential new hash (#) syntax for function definition and proposes an even further improvement by requiring a tail return value. In short, the discussion sums up the benefits of user playgrounding and feedback as supported by new improvements in Zaphod.

Zaphod Firefox Addon
Simple Modules
Dave Herman
Github for Narcissus
Andreas Gal
Adding a compiler to Narcissus (Woot!)
Brendan Eich JSConf EU 2010 Talk
Allows short cycle development of the JS language
CoffeeScript
Paren-Free
Function Shorthand Proposal (#)
What the func?
Douglas Crockford JSConf EU 2010 Talk
Proper Tail Calls are hopeful for future JS
Brendan's Harmony of My Dreams
Array negative indexing -> [1,2,3][-1] == 3
Brendan's proposed tuple syntax -> #[1,2,3]
Brendan's proposed frozen/immutable record syntax -> #{a:1, b:3}
Brendan's theory of language growth: "Add, Don't Break"
"We cannot think too small."

JavaScript, Hyperspeed

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:24:58 GMT

The Google Chrome team announces tremendous gains in performance and speed for their V8 engine and Brendan discusses how this is a very, very good thing for all involved. It shows that in the world of JS performance there is still much work that can and is being done to make significant gains, but those gains have to be tempered with proper benchmarking. A relatively quick shot of nerdery this week, just under 6 minutes, but well worth your time to learn both what is in Crankshaft and how other vendors (like Mozilla) are responding to it. Main gist: Open Source is awesome, but you already knew that!

New Programming Languages and Rust

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:11:36 GMT

A ~9 minute discussion on the upcoming Rust programming language in the context of why we still need new programming languages. Quite the interesting discussion to listen to especially since Brendan is one of the few language inventors who is both maintaining and growing a popular language (JS) while helping to construct a new language (Rust). Brendan proposes that we need more, not less, new programming languages to evolve and push computer science and programming, but that those should be built on the rich history we already have. In case you were wondering, this discussion was instigated by these various threads.

Rust programming language
Rust Language Twitter
Soft Launched Github Repo
Graydon Hoare Blog
Graydon Hoare Twitter
Patrick Walton Blog
Actor Model Discussions
Actor Model Definition
Rob Pike
NewSqueak
Erlang
Hermes
Nil
Mozilla Project
No Shared Mutable State
Go
Brendan admits being a huge fanboy of Rob Pike
Go: Shared mutable state Rust: No Shared Mutable State and Local Process Garbage Collection Activity (Shallow Stacks)
Rust emphasis safety over performance
LLVM
GCC
OCaml
Scala
Clojure

ECMA, TC-39, and Bears - Oh My!

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 02:24:41 GMT

Enough buzzwords and acronyms! Brendan gets serious about actually describing the committee process around JS, or as it is more formally known ECMAScript. Brendan rocks for 13.5 minutes on everything from what ECMAScript and what TC-39 means, where to learn more or follow the conversation, and then takes a deep dive into his Paren-Free blog post. This is a super doozy of a episode filled with more nerdcore details about the mysterious committee world that most people writing JS have only heard whispers of. He finishes it out with a survey of the efforts in the language to make more acceptable/agreeable syntax and lauds the possible virtues of a benevolent dictator as seen in the success of HTML5.

Wow. Just Wow.

Bytecode Standard In Browsers

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:05:22 GMT

Sit down and plug in for a 10 minute discussion of bytecode standards and other such stuff in the browser and how it has been attempted (and stalled) in the past. This also goes through several of the new improvements coming in the language that will make ideal for becoming a target language and possibly facilitate preferred language syntax (python, ruby, etc) that works on the JS VM. Finally Brendan drives home the less than obvious point that each new language has its own set of oddities and garbage collections and how that would go against making the web fast.

Why are we limited to JS in browsers - Would a bytecode standard help?
DOM Level 0
VBScript
Nick Thompson
'But Sun made it very difficult, building their complete bloated software stack from scratch.'
LiveConnect
Christian Heilmann
Opera Carakan
Version hell sucks e.g. Flash, Java
ES5 Strict Mode
Harmony Lexical Scope Changes
JS Typed Arrays - MDN Link
JS as a target language!
Binary Encoding of JS ASTs discussion
JSZap

The arguments Argument

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 19:06:23 GMT

From a listener request, Brendan drives a relatively concise discussion around the topic of the mysterious (and often confusing) 'arguments' object that is available within a function body in JavaScript. This goes into the upcoming spread, splat, and rest parameters within function descriptions and executions.

JavaScript arguments object
Function.prototype.apply
foo.arguments (old and busted) instead of arguments (better - not great)
Harmony Rest Parameters
Spread (Lisp) or Splat (Python)
Argument Lists
Array Initialiser
var z = [1,2,3]; (function (a, b, c) { return;})(...z);
CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript Splats... (note the difference).

A Threaded Discussion

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:07:06 GMT

Opening Pandora's box this week with a rather long and super deep discussion on the topic of threading, co-routines, and parallel programming as it applies to JavaScript and Garbage Collectors. This one is for the record books in terms of jam packed nerdcore greatness.

Deep Dive on ES-Harmony Modules

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:03:11 GMT

Because so many people thought the previous episode on modules was too short despite being roughly 1 minute (actually they thought there was an error with the file), Brendan Has nicely provided us with a major deep dive on the concept of modules with JavaScript, including why it is needed and how ECMA-TC39 is working to provide it. A great talk like always presenting in lightning speed.

Big Numbers and jwz

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:39:40 GMT

It is not often that you get to hear about the "good ole days" (1990s, for those wondering) and especially rare to hear the stories from deep inside Netscape. This week we get a peek in to some of the decisions that made JavaScript AND that period of time lovingly referred to as "The Bubble".

Taking Out The Garbage (Collector)

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:28:09 GMT

It is time to geek out once again, but this time with Garbage Collection and Compartments. Compartments are separate garbage collected heaps for each window/tab. Brendan gives a great overview of the current garbage collection in previous versions of Firefox (global mark and sweep) and other implementations like Google Chrome's single threaded generational copy collector. Super nerd score of 10 for this one.

Narcissus and Zaphod

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:43:47 GMT

A through discussion (~5 minutes) of the Narcissus JavaScript in JavaScript implementation and how it is being used within Mozilla and Firefox 4. Renewed interest has sprung around Narcissus thanks to some hard work from Mozilla interns that allows it to be run as the defacto JavaScript implementation within Firefox via a plugin aptly named Zaphod.

Future JavaScript

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:48:49 GMT

A swift discussion of the next generation language space and mentions of the various new items coming from the ECMA committee.

The Meeting Of The Monkeys

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:48:11 GMT

The recent Firefox 4 beta 7 harkens the bringing together of the latest Mozilla monkey, JaegerMonkey. This integrates the next generation of Just-In-Time compilation and a lot of various improvements and static analysis.

ES5 Strict Mode, Use With Caution

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:06:28 GMT

"use strict";

Almost 7 minutes of awesome ES5 strict mode discussion about what strict mode is and why you should be avoiding it when using file concatenation on JavaScript. If you know what you are doing, you should use it, otherwise it would be wise to take jslint.com's recommendations with this episode's grain of salt. Enjoy!

Firefox 4

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:13:51 GMT

All about the upcoming release of Firefox 4 including the new SpiderMonkey JS interpreter including what is upcoming with web workers and web sockets. For some awesome examples of sockets and workers, checkout the recent applications created as part of Node Knockout competition.

JS Type Inference and Static Analysis

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:16:42 GMT

Deep dive into cutting edge JS type inference and static analysis efforts.

The Future of JS Benchmarking

chris@iterativedesigns (Minute With) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:59:14 GMT

Super deep insight into JS Benchmarking and what is coming from Mozilla and Microsoft Research. Discussions about what is wrong with current benchmarking apparatuses and how things are going to improve. Listen in for the long haul, (yes it is longer than a minute again!!) for an amazing view of where JS performance analysis is heading