ECMAScript 4 Speaking Tour

November 9th, 2007

During the past two weeks I've given three presentations on Tamarin and ECMAScript 4. I've gotten a ton of great feedback, criticism, and commentary - all of which has been very helpful.

» Tamarin and ECMAScript 4

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Here's a quick re-cap of how the talks went:

Ajax Experience East (The Future of JavaScript)

There were some very smart questions asked by the audience here - and some pressing concerns. Although, the theme of "being concerned" was a large one throughout the conference (this was right about the time of the white paper release and ensuing blog kerfuffle). That being said, of those that attended my talks, I was able to help alleviate most of their initial doubts (such as towards backwards compatibility, the new type system, or the complexity of the language). It was pretty easy to spot conference attendees who did not attend my talk as those questions were raised again during the ensuing panel discussions. I generally found that those who were at the talk were able to get up to speed pretty quickly; understanding most of the changes and being excited about when they could start to test them.

Adobe Max Japan (Tamarin and ECMAScript 4)

This was a really unique speaking situation for me - talking to a large room of ActionScript developers about the future of their language. I only have a cursory knowledge of ActionScript so I was able to gloss over some of the details of ES4 (since they already have type annotations, classes, and packages). That being said, I got some really fantastic questions. Considering that these developers have already been using a large subset of ECMAScript 4 for close to 1.5 years it was great to hear the sort of concerns that they had.

Overwhelmingly, of the developers and Adobe employees that I talked to, everyone seems to love the new changes that were introduced in ActionScript 3 - and they're all looking forward to the ECMAScript 4-based updates. It's interesting to see where the ActionScript community has gone, as it's a good indicator of where the JavaScript community will lead once JavaScript 2 is out the door.

Mozilla Japan/Shibuya.JS (The Future of JavaScript)

This talk was the most fun, out of the three. I was primarily presenting to members of Shibuya.JS (the only JavaScript user group in the world) and they were very excited and asked lots of good, hard, questions. Probably their biggest concern was over the "expressiveness" of the language and if that would be maintained into the next version.

Members of Shibuya.JS streamed the talk that I gave to them over ustream - you can find recorded copies below:

» The Future of JavaScript (Video)

» The Future of JavaScript - Lightning Talks and Q&A (Video)

After the talks a number of us went out for dinner and it was great fun. We talked JavaScript, jQuery, and ECMAScript for many hours - frequently just writing code on paper to talk to each other (JavaScript being the universal language).

I hope I can make it back to Tokyo soon (Gen has a longer recap of my trip up) and be able to visit Shibuya.JS as well.

Seeing them in action has given me a serious itch to start up a Boston.JS group.

Tags: javascript, conferences, travel, tokyo, ecmascript, mozilla

15 Comments on 'ECMAScript 4 Speaking Tour'

Speaking in Tokyo

October 31st, 2007

I'm currently in Tokyo, getting ready to give a couple presentations on JavaScript 2/ECMAScript 4/ActionScript 4. It should be a lot of fun - this will probably be the first time that a lot of people hear about these language changes so I'm interested in getting some feedback. (I'll be posting my "Future of JavaScript" slides from last week's Ajax Experience conference, shortly.)

Specifically, I'll be speaking at the following two events:

Adobe Max Japan

I'm going to be giving a talk on Tamarin and ECMAScript 4 (which will be the next version of ActionScript). You can spot me on the speaker list as well.

The Adobe community is just as interested in seeing the progression of the ECMAScript language as JavaScript developers are (as they are, now, inherently bound going forward). I'll be curious to hear what sort of questions or concerns arise, especially considering that they've had ActionScript 3 (which is, sort of, halfway between ES 3 and 4) to play with for for quite some time now.

This will be another talk (presented, primarily, to the Shibuya.JS user group - in conjunction with Mozilla Japan). You can see Shibuya.JS' thoughts on the talk here. This event has already sold out - but I'm looking forward to meeting everyone who's coming!

As a side note: Shibuya.JS is the only JavaScript user group that I know about - really anywhere in the world. Looking through some of their lightning talks just goes to show how committed they are to talking about cool JavaScript code. For example, here's a presentation that was given on jQuery. While they glance over the fundamentals of the library, they immediately roll back the cover and look at the most interesting code contained within it (crazy hacks, i18n regexps, etc.) - I was very impressed. I'm definitely looking forward to speaking with them some more.

Tags: actionscript, mozilla, tokyo, javascript, ecmascript, javascript2

2 Comments on 'Speaking in Tokyo'