The SPLASH Submission Clock is Ticking

March 10, 2011

I’ve previously written about the SPLASH Conference and why you might consider writing for it. Now, is the time to get serious as April 8, 2011 is the submission deadline for the major SPLASH conference tracks. If your aren’t familiar with SPLASH, here is how the SPLASH website describes itself: Since 2010 SPLASH is the [...]

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A JavaScript Optional Argument Hazard

February 24, 2011

My recent post on testing for negative 0 in JavaScript created a lot of interest.  So today, I’m going to talk about another bit of JavaScript obscurity that was also inspired by a Twitter thread. I recently noticed this tweet go by: This was obviously a trick question.  Presumably some programmer expected this expression to [...]

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Testing for -0 in JavaScript

February 16, 2011

A few minutes ago I saw a tweet go by from my colleague, Dave Herman (@littlecalculist): For background you need to know that JavaScript Number values have distinct representations for +0 and -0.  This is a characteristic of IEEE floating point numbers upon which the specification for JavaScript numbers is based.  However, in most situations, [...]

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The Browser is a Transitional Technology

January 31, 2011

In the graphic for my Third Era of Computing post I have two pairs of lines labeled “Transitional Technologies”. In my model, a transitional technology is a technology that emerges as a computing era settles into maturity and which is a precursor to the successor era. Transitional technologies are firmly rooted in the “old” era [...]

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Some ECMAScript Technical Resources

January 28, 2011

This week I’ve been doing some analysis of the specification of object semantics in the current ECMAScript preparation.  This is in support of some new proposals and and  specifications that I’m writing for the next edition of ECMAScript. Some of this material may be useful for readers of the specification and in particular developers who [...]

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The Third Era of Computing

January 23, 2011

Most of us spend most of our time working on immediate problems. Designing a new site, adding a feature to an app, revising a specification, etc. We all need to focus on these short-term problems but sometimes it is useful to step back and look at the larger context within which we are working. Last [...]

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SPLASH – Write to Share

January 6, 2011

One of my goals as member of the Mozilla research team is to encourage more public sharing of innovative ideas that contribute to the open web.  One way that this sharing can occur is via conference papers. My last post announced the call for papers for the ACM SPLASH conference Wavefront program.  I want to [...]

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Make a SPLASH – Write a Paper

January 5, 2011

The ACM SPLASH Conference has published the call for papers for a new SPLASH program component called Wavefront that is focused on what I call “webish” computing.  To quote the CfP: The nature of computing is rapidly changing. Whether you label it ubiquitous, ambient, pervasive, social, mobile, web, cloud, or post-PC computing, it touches all [...]

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Extending the JavaScript Object Model

December 17, 2010

At the core of the JavaScript language is its “object model”. An object model defines the object abstraction of an language.  It tells users how to think about objects in a language — how are objects composed and what they can do.  It also tells language implementers what they must manifest as an object to [...]

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Announcing ECMAScript 5.1

December 15, 2010

The latest JavaScript language standard, ECMAScript 5, was approved by the Ecma International General Assembly one year ago.  Since then it has seen rapid adoption in new browsers releases. Once approved by Ecma, ES5 entered a process to become an ISO standard. That process should be completed in early 2011.  The ISO edition of the [...]

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