Every single presentation of Brendan has this "I made this in 10 days" thing, super annoying. JavaScript is a great example how your career can go pretty well if you're good at selling what you're building, even if it's not very good.
This isn't meant as a "JavaScript sucks" type of comment, but as a "being good at presenting your work is really important" type of comment. Too many really strong engineers aren't good at selling their work, so we end up with JavaScript.
1. I think he mentions it because it is an interesting part of JS's birth. There are some ambiguous things about JS that makes people ask, why is this the way it is? Well, one explanation is that, it wasn't a carefully planned language in its conception. Someone needed some language that worked on top of browsers really soon and Eich had to deliver something. So he must have cut corners and made some difficult pragmatic decisions to just make a language that just works on browser. "I made this in 10 days" goes perfectly with this story Eich wants to tell. It's catchy and understandable.
2. O please. Stop with this arrogance. Even if you didn't mean it, it totally comes off as "JS sucks" comment. JS as a language has a huge value in it being a first mover and generating network effect. Would you rather have that we use Java VM on browsers? Or would you rather have 12 different languages used in differently, implemented differently in 12 different browsers? To make matters worse, would you like browsers to change its languages based on what's considered a flavor of the week?
Every presentation is, for some people, the first one they are going to see about JS. It's a reminder of what is possible in 10 days, what the shortcomings may be and how long you may have to live with those shortcomings. It can't be repeated often enough.
I think he includes it as a joke .. clearly the first few slide states started "in 1993" and done "in 1995". The 10 days seems to be a self-deprecating joke on the popular (incorrect) meme.
The joke in those slides was how I went from my before-Netscape health (the picture of me doing a back handspring was from 1993; I joined Netscape in April 1995) to the after-those-ten-days-in-May-1995 state (looking like Ash from Evil Dead 3, with chainsaw for hand).
From 1992 to 1995 I worked for MicroUnity. No JavaScript there! It was not even a gleam in my eye, although I did write a language processor for editing MPEG-2 streams.
So I indeed created JS in a mad rush to get it into Netscape 2, along with other things Netscape tried as part of a platform play against Microsoft.
If I had not rushed, I would have missed not only Netscape 2, but also Netscape 3. Netscape 3 was supposed to be version 2.1, a minor release, until a company Netscape had acquired was given the browser and screwed up their release schedule so badly that it slipped into 1997 and became Netscape 4.
In 1998 or even 1997 it would have been too late to ship JS and have it make a de-facto standard. MS had already shipped VBScript as a me-too, and if they did not have JS to imitate, it would have been even more Microsoftian.
VBScript was the alternative to the JS rush job, in my settled view. I don't write this out of pride, joy, or defensiveness. I simply think it's the likeliest alternative outcome.
(Updated to correct Netscape 4 date per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communicator to June 1997. It was so buggy that a series of firedrill releases were required to get it into barely usable shape by '98, which is what burned that year into my memory.)
Wanted - Fullstack VBScript developers
You have:
Delivered a fully functioning single page application Using Vanilla VBS.
Delivered high performance backends with ASP(using VBScript)
Advantage - you've used Angular.vbs and Backbone.vbs, and are familiar with react.vbs
I suspect that it might be simple to make something like JS in 10 days when you can effectively delegate the heavy lifting of making it fast etc. (see last slide) to many other people after it has become ubiquitous. :)
I wrote my own interpreters for my own languages, including stuff used in production. 10 days for designing and implementing something like JavaScript is pretty good.
Also, I think that the number of problems in JS normalized by the time it took to make the first version (and that time limit was due to a deadline that the creator did not choose) is very likely smaller than in many, many other languages, if not all the remotely popular ones.
This isn't meant as a "JavaScript sucks" type of comment, but as a "being good at presenting your work is really important" type of comment. Too many really strong engineers aren't good at selling their work, so we end up with JavaScript.