JSConf and NodeConf were both held in Portland Oregon last week, and they were both great conferences. Well run, great food, lively parties, and friendly organizers and attendees. I had a good time, though it was very tiring.
Hearing from Mr. Ike about the future of JavaScript was interesting. I personally don’t like some of the CoffeeScript inspired changes (I like my curly braces!), but that’s what 25 years of C/C++/ObjectiveC will do to you I suppose :).
Node.js seems to be a very interesting platform with a lot of attention an interest. I want to dig deeper into it and figure out how they do what they do (kqueue and epoll apparently). Supposedly they are using threads internally for the fileIO, but I don’t understand why since kqueue seems to support file descriptors. Lots for me to learn as I’ve not done a great deal of unix programming, and certainly nothing at this low level.
JavaScript still seems messy and there seems to be a battle going on between the Procedural, OOP and functional programming communities to shape the language which is unfortunate. Seems like it is ending up being a mish-mash of all of these and thus rather messy and chaotic. Perhaps I just need to actually learn it before I see the “beauty” of JavaScript! 🙂
Anyway, thanks to the organizers – it was a well coordinated event. And thanks to the other attendees who were almost all friendly and patient with this novice JavaScript & Node.js neophyte.
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