Lex Fridman has carried out many lengthy interviews on his common podcast. Even so, the episode with the legendary programmer John Carmack has an unhinged director’s-cut really feel to it. Over 5 hours, Carmack dishes on the whole lot from vector operations to Doom. But it’s one thing Fridman says, offhand, that actually justifies the prolonged run time: “I think that if we’re living in a simulation, it’s written in JavaScript.”

To evaluation: JavaScript is what makes static net pages “dynamic.” Without it, the web would resemble nothing a lot as an after-hours arcade, lifeless and darkish. These days, the language is utilized in each front- and backend growth for a complete host of cell platforms and apps, together with Slack and Discord. And the principle factor to grasp about it, within the context of Fridman’s nerdy koan, is that this: For any self-respecting programmer, admitting to really liking JavaScript is one thing of a pretend pas—very similar to an art-house filmmaker confessing to Marvel fandom.

I suppose this has one thing to do with the truth that JavaScript was created in much less time than it takes to home-brew a jar of kombucha: 10 days. In 1995, Netscape employed a programmer named Brendan Eich to create a language to embed in its browser, Netscape Navigator. Originally referred to as LiveScript, the language was renamed JavaScript to piggyback on the hype round an unrelated language referred to as Java, which had been launched earlier that yr. (Asked the distinction between Java and JavaScript, a programmer is more likely to joke: “Java is to JavaScript what car is to carpet.”) To this present day, few folks contemplate JavaScript a very well-designed language, least of all Eich. “I perpetrated JavaScript in 1995,” he as soon as mentioned, “and I’ve been making up for it ever since.”

What was his crime, precisely? You can simply discover scads of weblog posts, memes, and Reddit threads sandbagging JavaScript, however my favourite is a four-minute talk by software program engineer Gary Bernhardt titled “Wat.” Imagine, for starters, exhibiting a gaggle of non-English audio system the current and previous types of verbs like boil (boil/boiled) and chew (chew/chewed). Then, if you ask them for the conjugation of eat, who may blame them for answering eat/eated? Similarly, the “Wat” discuss is a blooper reel of JavaScript’s quirks and unpredictable behaviors. Let’s say you wish to kind an inventory of numbers: [50, 100, 1, 10, 9, 5]. Calling the built-in kind operate in any sane language returns the checklist in numerically ascending order: [1, 5, 9, 10, 50, 100]. Doing so in JavaScript returns [1, 10, 100, 5, 50, 9], the place 10 and 100 are thought of bigger than 5. Why? Because JavaScript interprets every quantity as a string kind and does lexical sorting, not numerical sorting. Total madness.

When Fridman says JavaScript runs the world, in different phrases, what he means is that our world is, just like the underlying supply code, massively screwed up and incomprehensible. It’s the equal of announcing, with a sigh, that contemplating the sorry state of the planet, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should have been written in Comic Sans.

At this level, I ought to confess that whereas JavaScript is just not my favourite language, I prefer it. Adore it, actually. So I can’t assist however really feel a flare of disapproval each time a sure fraternity of programmers polemicizes towards it. Often they concentrate on flaws that have been handled years in the past. To dwell on JavaScript’s unique shortcomings is to miss the truth that any piece of software program—and each programming language is, in essence, a collection of software program—is amenable to revision and enchancment.