Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- The Jordan Harbinger Show: https://jordanharbinger.com/lex/
- Sun Basket: https://sunbasket.com/lex and use code LEX to get $35 off
- BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off
- Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings

EPISODE LINKS:
Brendan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich
Brendan's Website: https://brendaneich.com
Brave browser: https://brave.com

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:53 - History of early programming languages
6:46 - Physics needs more experiments and less theory
11:23 - JavaScript origin story
36:16 - JavaScript was created in 10 days
45:56 - Marc Andreessen
49:13 - Internet Explorer
52:57 - Evolution of JavaScript
58:43 - Javascript standardization
1:04:33 - TypeScript
1:07:04 - JavaScript ecosystem
1:10:14 - HTML5
1:13:46 - Making JavaScript fast
1:22:56 - JavaScript is the most popular language in the world
1:33:22 - Advice for programmers
1:39:19 - Browser wars
1:45:49 - Firefox
2:07:32 - Brave
2:20:32 - Basic Attention Token
2:45:35 - California
2:54:47 - Mortality
2:55:53 - Legacy

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

The following is a conversation with Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language, co-founder of Mozilla, which created the Firefox browser, and now co-founder and CEO of Brave Software, which has created the Brave browser.

Each of these are revolutionary technologies.

JavaScript is 1 of the most widely used and impactful programming languages in the world.

Firefox pioneered many browser ideas that we love today or even take for granted today.

And Brave is looking to revolutionize not only the browser, but content creation online and the nature of the internet to make it fundamentally about respecting people's control over their data.

Quick mention of our sponsors, the Jordan Harbinger Show, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, BetterHelp online therapy, and 8 sleep self-cleaning mattress.

Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that there's a tension between theory and engineering that I've been thinking a lot about.

I tweeted something like, good execution is more important than a good idea, but 1 helps the other.

I think the wording of that sucks, but what I mean is a good idea is a must.

But in my experience, good ideas are in abundance.

Good execution, on the other hand, is rare.

I think some mix of good timing, good idea, and good execution is essential.

Getting that mix right is tough, and Brendan somehow, multiple times in his career, did just that.

I'm starting to believe it's more art than science, like most interesting things in life.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Brendan Eich.

When did you first fall in love with programming?

And after we saw Star Wars, he said, hey, let's make a basic program that does the Death Star Trench run.

And I didn't know what I was doing, so I just helped him out on the math and stuff like that.

I was really into the HP calculators of the early mid 70s.

They were really strongly built and as Art Goldfinger said of gold, divinely heavy.

There's probably some gold in them too, gold metalization.

But They were awesome calculators and they had all the scientific functions, so I was really into that.

a little late for the, I think, the 20th century golden age, and I read a lot of science fiction, so I was like, yeah, it's on to hyperdrives and warp drives.

And physics was not gonna get there quickly, And I started hacking on computers while I was studying physics as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University.

And I dodged the Fortran bullet because I was in the science department instead of the engineering department where they still did Fortran, card decks.

But we were using Pascal and I got 1 of the first portable C compilers ports to the deck mini computers we were using.

And I fell in love with programming just based on procedural abstraction, Pascal, just what now would be considered old school, like structured programming from the 70s.

Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal, was a good writer and a good pedagogue.

He always, at ETH, would do these courses where it's like build your own computer, build your own compiler, build your own operating system.

And I know some people who are grad students under him and said he was, he would torture the students with things like this custom email system that had 25 word limit.

I unfortunately dodged both the Pascal and the Fortran bullets.

Could you maybe linger on the Pascal, like what kind of programming language was it?

Because it sounds like it may have had an impact on your own trajectory.

Yeah, it was in the Algol family, and Algol was the big successful language design and compiler project in the 60s.

It had a successor called Algol 68, which was ambitious but not as successful.

But Pascal was kind of a wordy procedures and functions language.

It distinguished between functions, which return a value, and procedures, which don't, which just compute.

And you could say that whole Algol family went into Ada.

Pascal had a second life, thanks to Borland with Turbo Pascal, which was hugely successful, I think in large part due to Anders Helsberg, who then went to Microsoft and did C Sharp and done that with his team there, and has done really well, doing TypeScript, type JavaScript.

So yeah, there's a lineage here, But I was also interested in C and Unix by the time I was an undergrad because people were bringing Unix up on all sorts of hardware.

I had some friends who were doing their own wire wrapped computers,

And I was wire wrapping for my engineering course, 1609 or something simpler, building a computer on a board.

And I wanted to build a more ambitious 1 and port Unix to it, but I picked the wrong processor.

I picked the National Semiconductor NS16032, which was this amazing CISC, Complex Instruction Set Computer, and not the reduced instruction set computers that were just being contemplated into the

RISC-I in some ways, it dissolved into, you have both now, you have these super scalar architectures where like Intel has kept probably too much backward compatibility at the instruction level, but that's just a, there's a front end that parses that into these, you know, these wide internal instructions.

So, you know, the very long instruction word research that was also interesting at the time kind of became the microarchitecture inside the backward compatible Intel.

But I picked a national semi-chip and it never got made successfully.

It was full of bugs and I never could have brought it up.

But I went on out of physics after 3 years into math, computer science.

And like I said, I did it because I saw, I was being sort of childlike and naive about physics and I thought, meanwhile the valley is go-go for computers.

8088-based PC, the IBM, you know, gave Microsoft the future for, you know, somewhat fishy deal.

So it was wide open in the computing space, but in physics, you were as optimistic about physics as

No, I mean, I was 1 of 3 brothers who were all in the same grade.

I have a twin and a younger brother who skipped second grade and was with us the whole time after that.

And he went on, he actually studied under Kip Thorne at Caltech.

But he also didn't, he ended up in software.

Does it make you sad that theoretical physics, even with string theory, hasn't really had any foundational breakthroughs in the latter part of the 20th century.

Yeah, in fact, I'd say the problem is theory over experiments.

I would say we need more Aristotle and less Plato.

There are lots of mathematics that cannot be realized as far as I know in this world.

So to understand the world, you need to do experiments.

You need to not just dream up inductive theories that could have lots of alternative theories competing with them, with no way to decide between them, except aesthetics, which is not a good guide, in my opinion.

I don't know if you are friends with, have a relationship with Elon Musk.

Where's the, in terms of what you would love to see our society investing in building up.

Is it closer to Elon or is it closer to Feynman and Einstein and those?

Well, those gentlemen are no longer with us and I think that's noticed.

So, like I said, the real glory days of physics, the famous pictures from Germany before the second war were just a fantastic assembly of brains, Schrodinger and Einstein.

Physics, I think, took a wrong turn that maybe all of, I would say, Western science took in going for models over reality, right?

Now, we can build models that are very predictive and generative and then we build actual devices or semiconductors, things like that.

We need good models, we need to experiment and prove them and test them.

But the problem I've seen in physics, which you see certainly in economics, the dismal science, and you see surprisingly in other so-called hard sciences is models that don't really have to be tested against reality.

They can instead become policy tools or they can become, like I said, 1 of a large family of alternate theories that could be as predictive, but Nobody's doing the winnowing out.

That's such an interesting tension in society.

You see this in even the software scientists which I have a deep love for, like psychology.

You see this in epidemiology, not with the virus.

It's this tension of, you know, how much of the world can we understand through just a beautifully fit model?

And then at the same time, my main work is in machine learning, where it's like there is no provable thing usually.

It's just kind of you, It's all about just getting the right data set and getting tricks and so on.

And there's this tension, even in my own soul, of I grew up on theoretical computer science.

I loved approximation algorithms, all of that different complexity classes, just those little puzzles.

I mean, I don't know, to you, as somebody who was in math and computer science and then ended up going into places where you engineered some of the most impactful things in this world, Do you see the P versus NP, all that whole space, is interesting at all?

Yeah, it's not that useful in practice, right?

People are using it with sort of crypto analysis or asymptotic arguments about, you know, can we have a quantum resistant crypto algorithm, things like that, which may not be practical, right?

If you follow Mikhail Diakonov or Gil Kalai, there are big questions about how quantum computing will scale up, how practical it will be.

Is that something that you think about quantum computing?

Like you said, I'm not using this kind of computer science in practice because almost everything now is engineering and finding ways to get computers to be more useful for people, which goes from design problems, which are really kind of an art.

Like Knuth said, anything you can't automate is an art.

Well, we can have machine learning compose music and it can imitate, you can train it, and it can sound kind of decent, but maybe lacking that je ne sais quoi.

But user interface still, I think, requires human art.

So speaking of things that didn't follow a perfect theory and model, JavaScript.

1 had an impact on the world at a huge scale, obviously, and it also still is 1 of probably the most popular programming language in the world.

Can you tell the story of how JavaScript was created?

Yeah, I was at Silicon Graphics after graduate school for 7 years, and it got to be big and successful and divisionalized and political, and I thought, kind of boring.

And a friend who'd been there went to 1 of the last of the super companies, the super startups in the early 90s.

I suppose General Magic was a little after that or around the same time.

But MicroUnity was that company that I went to and it was because my friend Jeff Weinstein had gone there from Silicon Graphics, he recruited me, and MicroUnity was doing everything.

So this was like the ultimate sort of pretend grad school.

It was doing a new fab, new semiconductor process, it was doing new analog and digital circuits on the same, very large but not wafer scale chip.

Originally it was 5 centimeters on a side.

It was really hot too, so I needed a water cooler.

It was a Crank killer and then they shrunk it and they tried to do a home sort of media processor that was essentially a barrel processor, but you could think of trying to do all the things that we now see in modern architectures with short vector instructions and sort of wide instructions for multiple issue.

And doing a lot of the stuff in software, because the second iteration, the set-top box, was really for avoiding the cost to the cable company of rolling the trucks out to replace your garbage General Atlantic set-top box with a totally newer, less garbagey 1.

So if you could have software-gradeable set-top boxes, the cable companies thought they could save a lot of money and add features.

It was like, we were writing in, we were using GCC, we were writing C++ and C.

Somebody I worked with there, really very smart guy, hired from a sort of Wall Street hotshot programming consultancy, did his own hardware design as well as software.

And we were working on how to make not only short vector units, but general bit shufflers and permuters.

So you could do things like, you know, crypto algorithms efficiently, and you could do demodulation of the cable, you know, complex quadrature amplitude modulated signal.

So you're basically taking A to D converters, dumping things in buffers, and then doing the rest in software.

All the framing and the Reed-Solomon and Viterbi and all that error correction.

So that was really great learning experience, but it was not gonna work.

It was doing too many risky things at once.

As Jim Clark said to me when I hopped to Netscape after 3 years at MicroUnity, he said, oh yeah, you do 10 things, each 1 in 10 odds, it's gonna be 1 in 10 billion.

So Netscape was already a rocket and I passed the chance to go there in 1994.

I knew the founders because I worked at SGI Clark's company.

And Netscape, when was the launch of this rocket?

Well, I missed the first floor employment opportunity, but the IPO was August 1995, so I was there for that.

How obvious was it that Netscape was world changing?

Was Netscape 1 of the first big browsers?

Yes, so when I was at MicroUnity still in 93, we saw a browser called Mosaic.

And up till then, we'd used email, and we'd used Usenet, the NNTP protocol, we'd used Newsreaders, we used FTP, we used all these old internet protocols, all relying on the DNS and TCP IP and UDP for that matter.

When I was at Silicon Graphics, we brought up the whole stack, right?

We had to discover how to find the ethernet addresses on your network and then find IP addresses for them, ARP protocol, all that stuff.

And it was great because nobody knew in the 80s what was gonna win.

All the proprietary stacks like IBM, SNA, and DECnet and all these other protocols were saying, we're gonna do it or it's gonna be heterogeneous future.

Instead it was Berkeley Unix and the TCP IP stack that dated back to the ARPANET that won.

And I think we knew it, we all knew it at SGI, but the salespeople didn't, and so they kept trying to get multiple network stacks interoperating, but in the end it won.

And so that was the internet, and it was email and texty, and it was used in, very texty.

And then Tim Berners-Lee did his thing, but I don't think I was paying attention.

And I think the date when he first did it, or when he wrote the famous email, it's been pushed back to 89.

But I noticed a mosaic in 93, because 1 of the things that Mark Andreessen and Eric Bina did at NCSA was they innovated on the early HTML standard.

In particular, Mark sent this email saying, hey everybody, we think you should be able to put an image in a page.

And you know when he sent that, Eric Bean had already written the code.

And I talked to Tim Berners-Lee more recently, just a few years ago, and he was like, oh, we had another way of doing it.

And it didn't work out, because Mark shipped his in Mosaic.

1, the internet meant there was a huge first mover advantage and being fast, getting on first, mattered a lot.

And so, you know, Richard Gabriel of scheme and poetry fame has written about this.

No, no, I mean, he's the founder of Lucid, which is where Jamie Zawinski worked before Netscape.

And Lucid was doing compilers and Lucid Emacs, which was a fork of Emacs, famously Jamie fighting against Richard Stallman, Stallmax.

And so Richard Gabriel, very brainy computer guy, but also a poet, but he wrote a nice essay that gets abused all the time.

In fact, Jamie's put a kind of warning in front of his version of it on his site, JWC.org, called Worse is Better.

And this is about survival advantage of software in a networked world, in my opinion.

It's about Unix, it started out being framed as Unix and Lisp, good news, bad news, because all the Lisp people, the MIT people were like, oh, the crown jewel scheme, this Fabergé egg, or Common List, this giant cathedral, of course we're gonna win, this is civilization.

And those farmers in New Jersey, to borrow from the Sopranos, those hicks down at Bell Labs, they're just, there's nothing sound there, it's all hacking.

Wow, so you're saying this is a fundamental principle of the internet is moving fast winds.

You could say in almost any network system, like in biological evolution, you see successful allele-sweep populations, and they don't always have, they aren't free of flaws, they can use a heterozygous advantage, right?

You can get, both parents give you the gene variant, and you get sickle cell anemia, right?

But if 1 of them does, you're more resistant to malaria.

And so this isn't a beautiful process, except at large scale.

And then you realize that because it moves fast and can adapt, it can win.

I used to struggle with this, because JavaScript was done in such a hurry, and the force of web compatibility meant early mistakes couldn't be fixed.

And even the standards process injected new mistakes, as it will.

But often standards bodies go back in making compatible changes.

You don't wanna break ATP metabolism or whatever.

So you have to kind of resign yourself to the reality of worse is better being enshrined in actual design points you might not like.

And that happened with JavaScript and I'm way over it, but it also, I think, was a huge advantage, which is why JavaScript has kind of swept a lot of programming domains.

People will say, oh, it's not because of merit.

Well, you're right, but we also improved it over time in the standards body.

It's like, I'm not saying that that was the best language.

I'm just saying that was the right time to do it.

And I like to say the alternative was not to do it.

I could have told Netscape, I can't do this, it's too rushed, and it would have been visual basic script.

So that's a good way to present the alternative.

But so it was a Netscape, and you have written it in how many days and why was it only that many days and what was the goal and the underlying principles in your mind at the time?

So the whole, I'm sort of describing Worse's better in a frenetic way because it fit the model of Netscape.

When it was known that Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen were founding Netscape, and they did the first release in 1994, that browser took over from Mosaic.

In fact, that's why Mozilla is called that.

It's like the giant monster that kills Mosaic.

And they knew that, you know, it wasn't that, again, it's not like you're doing advanced scientific research that is changing the world.

You're more like taking down the last iteration of the browser Mark did, which had images, and you know, other affordances before he stopped working on it.

And you're making Netscape, the new thing that has images, plugins, which was the way to do video back in the day.

It had something that's kind of died now for tiled windows called frames and framesets.

So when I got there, they were heading toward IPO.

And that kicked off the whole dot-com era, right?

You can see old Law & Order reruns where they talk about the recession and how hard it's hitting New Yorkers.

And after that, Greenspan really goosed things at the Federal Reserve and technology had been sort of fermenting in a way that came together with the internet.

And Netscape made it possible to do pets.com, to do eBay, to get people to recognize a URL on a billboard and then type it in when they get home.

That was so fast moving a rocket that Mark and the engineering team there thought, We need to make this a programmable browser, not just a document viewer, not just a video.

was all HTML with images and tables and also like you said, frames.

Yeah, the most dynamism we get was from a plugin, which there are a few of them then.

In fact, I was recruited to go do Scheme in the browser.

Remember, guys stealing Gerald Sussman's beautiful Lisp variant?

I was gonna do it in the browser because my friends from SGI thought, hey, we like Scheme, you like Scheme, and I'm like, I hardly ever use Scheme, it's not really used in industry except in sort of silos.

Okay, I'll come do Scheme in the browser.

I have a slide from my 2017 talk where I have Bruce Willis crawling through the duct in Die Hard.

He's like, come out to the coast, have a lot

But when I got there, there was no Scheme in the Browser because they'd started a deal with Sun Microsystems.

And my best contact there was Bill Joy, who I admired as a Berkeley Unix founder and son founder.

And Bill got the idea of making the browser programmable too.

And so the main idea was to put the Java VM, which at that point was not really easy to embed, into Netscape, including the Netscape version of Windows that was still most popular, which was the 16-bit Windows

Microsoft was coming out with Windows 95 and everyone was afraid they were gonna do Internet Explorer, I guess, 2 at that 0.3 the next year.

They already bought or invested in somehow Spyglass, this other company that shot out from NCSA at University of Illinois.

And in fact, Microsoft had tried to buy Netscape in late 94 before I got there.

And I heard about this later, I heard they offered way too little money and so Jim Barksdale and Jim Clark said, get out of here, pound sand.

But then they realized, oh, this is going to hurt us because now they're gonna copy us.

I'm not sure when Gates' internet tidal wave memo was written, that's the famous memo he wrote when Bill Gates realized that Microsoft was going down this old copy AOL path or copy CompuServe path.

A project called Blackbird, presumably after the SR-71, I don't know.

But they were gonna make a dial-up service with a custom content language stack and custom rendering.

They could have content partners, they have a lot of money, but it still wasn't the scale of the web.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave | Lex Fridman Podcast #160