The Birth & Death of JavaScript: Gary Bernhardt's PyCon talk

Gary Bernhardt's talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" is circulating again among developers, more than a decade after it was first delivered at PyCon 2014. The recording, published on the Destroy All Software website, remains one of the most unusual pieces of conference material in the field: a science fiction comedy that its author describes as completely serious.

A history of programming from 1995 to 2035

The talk is built as a retrospective from the future. It traces the history of JavaScript — and of programming in general — from 1995 until 2035, and it ends in a world where the language's role has changed entirely. The "death" in the title does not mean that JavaScript disappears: in the scenario the talk presents, it stops being a language developers write by hand and becomes the lowest common layer of the web, the target that other languages compile to.

Not for or against JavaScript

Bernhardt is explicit that the talk is neither pro- nor anti-JavaScript. The language's flaws are discussed frankly, and its early years are not treated gently, but the conclusion is that JavaScript's ultimate impact on the industry has been tremendously positive. That mix — a comedy format carrying a real argument about how platforms evolve — is a large part of why the recording is still passed around today.

More than a joke

The same site hosts Bernhardt's screencasts and Execute Program, a set of interactive courses on TypeScript, modern JavaScript, SQL and regular expressions. Each course is made up of hundreds of interactive code examples that run live in the browser — the less futuristic, more serious counterpart to the talk.

For anyone who missed it the first time, the value of the recording is less in its prediction than in its argument: the layer everyone complains about can turn out to be the layer everything else is eventually built on.