Seibeclass="underline" But you feel like overall we’re making some progress?
Crockford: Progress isn’t always forward. Sometimes we’re leaping forward and sometimes we’re leaping backwards. When we leaped to the PC, we lost a whole lot of stuff. In the timesharing era, we had social systems online. A timesharing system was a marketplace. It was a community and everybody who was a part of that system could exchange email, they could exchange files, they could chat, they could play games. They were doing all this stuff and all that got lost when we went to PCs. It took another 20 years or so to get that back.
We also took a huge step backwards in terms of security. Timesharing systems were starting to understand how to defend the system and the users of the system from each other. When we went to PCs, you owned your machine and everything running in that machine had the same privileges, the same rights to do whatever it had to do, and it turned out that not all the software running in your machine is acting in your interest. We’re still struggling with that. We’ve seen lots of improvements going into the PC operating systems, but we’re still not at the point where some of the more forward-looking timesharing systems were way, way back.
Seibeclass="underline" Which ones are you thinking of?
Crockford: MULTICS was doing some really interesting stuff in cooperative processes, and having multiple address spaces which were able to communicate with each other but couldn’t get into each other’s stuff. That’s the basic baseline you need in order to start doing cooperative computing. And we’re now trying to figure out how to get that into the browser. It’s a long time between MULTICS and here. We’re starting now to catch up to insights that were being acted on way back then.
Seibeclass="underline" 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.
Seibeclass="underline" 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.
Seibeclass="underline" 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.
Seibeclass="underline" 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.
Seibeclass="underline" 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.
Seibeclass="underline" 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.