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Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University. He co-authored the C Programming Language with Dennis Ritchie (creator of C) and has written a lot of books on programming, computers, and life including the Practice of Programming, the Go Programming Language, his latest UNIX: A History and a Memoir. He co-created AWK, the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself. He co-designed AMPL, an algebraic modeling language for large-scale optimization.

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So what do you think about another language of JavaScript that's this...

Well let me just sort of comment on what I said.

What I was brought up, sort of JavaScript was seen as the probably like the ugliest language possible.

And yet it's quite arguably, quite possibly taking over not just the front end, the back end of the internet, but possibly in the future taking over everything because they've now learned to make it very efficient.

Yeah, well, I think you've captured it in a lot of ways.

When it first came out, JavaScript was deemed to be fairly irregular and an ugly language.

And certainly in the academy, if you said you were working on JavaScript, people would ridicule you.

It was just not fit for academics to work on.

The language itself has evolved, and certainly the technology of compiling it is fantastically better than it was.

And so in that sense, it's absolutely a viable solution on backends as well as the frontends.

Used well, I think it's a pretty good language.

I've written a modest amount of it and I've played with JavaScript translators and things like that.

I'm not a real expert and it's hard to keep up even there with the new things that come along with it.

So I don't know whether it will ever take over the world, I think not, but it's certainly an important language and worth knowing more about.

There's, maybe to get your comment on something, which JavaScript and actually most languages, sort of Python, such a big part of the experience of programming with those languages includes libraries.

So if using, building on top of the code that other people have built.

I think that's probably different from the experience that we just talked about from Unix and C days when you're building stuff from scratch.

What do you think about this world of essentially leveraging, building up libraries on top of each other and leveraging them?

1 of the reasons programming was fun in the old days was that you were really building it all yourself.

The number of libraries you had to deal with was quite small.

Maybe it was printf or the standard library or something like that.

If you want to do something, you mentioned Python and JavaScript, and those are the 2 fine examples.

You have to typically download a boatload of other stuff and you have no idea what you're getting.

I've been doing some playing with machine learning over the last couple of days, and gee, something doesn't work.

Well, you pip install this, okay, and down comes another gazillion megabytes of something and you have no idea what it was.

And if it doesn't work, you have no recourse.

There's absolutely no way you could figure out which in these thousand different packages.

And I think it's worse in the NPM environment for JavaScript.

I think there's less discipline, less control there.

And there's aspects of not just not understanding how it works, but there's security issues, there's robustness issues, so you don't want to run a nuclear power plant using JavaScript essentially.


Speaker 0: So what do you think about another language of JavaScript that's this... Well let me just sort of comment on what I said. What I was brought up, sort of JavaScript was seen as the probably like the ugliest language possible. And yet it's quite arguably, quite possibly taking over not just the front end, the back end of the internet, but possibly in the future taking over everything because they've now learned to make it very efficient. Yeah.

And so what do you think about this?

Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think you've captured it in a lot of ways. When it first came out, JavaScript was deemed to be fairly irregular and an ugly language. And certainly in the academy, if you said you were working on JavaScript, people would ridicule you. It was just not fit for academics to work on. I think a lot of that has evolved.

The language itself has evolved, and certainly the technology of compiling it is fantastically better than it was. And so in that sense, it's absolutely a viable solution on backends as well as the frontends. Used well, I think it's a pretty good language. I've written a modest amount of it and I've played with JavaScript translators and things like that. I'm not a real expert and it's hard to keep up even there with the new things that come along with it.

So I don't know whether it will ever take over the world, I think not, but it's certainly an important language and worth knowing more about.

Speaker 0: There's, maybe to get your comment on something, which JavaScript and actually most languages, sort of Python, such a big part of the experience of programming with those languages includes libraries. So if using, building on top of the code that other people have built. I think that's probably different from the experience that we just talked about from Unix and C days when you're building stuff from scratch. What do you think about this world of essentially leveraging, building up libraries on top of each other and leveraging them?

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a very perceptive question. 1 of the reasons programming was fun in the old days was that you were really building it all yourself. The number of libraries you had to deal with was quite small. Maybe it was printf or the standard library or something like that. That is not the case today.

If you want to do something, you mentioned Python and JavaScript, and those are the 2 fine examples. You have to typically download a boatload of other stuff and you have no idea what you're getting. Absolutely nothing. I've been doing some playing with machine learning over the last couple of days, and gee, something doesn't work. Well, you pip install this, okay, and down comes another gazillion megabytes of something and you have no idea what it was.

And if you're lucky, it works. And if it doesn't work, you have no recourse. There's absolutely no way you could figure out which in these thousand different packages. And I think it's worse in the NPM environment for JavaScript. I think there's less discipline, less control there.

Speaker 0: And there's aspects of not just not understanding how it works, but there's security issues, there's robustness issues, so you don't want to run a nuclear power plant using JavaScript essentially.

Speaker 1: Probably not. You

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Will Javascript Take Over the World? | Brian Kernighan and Lex Fridman