Locknote: How JavaScript Happened: A Short History of Programming Languages - Mark Rendle 

thanks bro literally saved my life

@@tttcsame 😂

Thanks, I thought my earbuds were broken, lol

True that ASCII has always been 7-bits, but in the first version (released June 1963 as ASA X3.4-1963) only the first 96 values were defined (and DEL as 127) and curly braces weren't among the defined values. There were some discussion about reserving some values for "National Use", like é, ü, æ and so on - particularly the last few values: 123, 124, and 125 - which are now { | and }, but still print as national characters on some older printers. It took until 1967 to finish the ASCII-standard as it has been ever since - still 7 bits, but now with all possible values defined. (Man I feel nerdy now - guess Mark got the requested youtube-correction :) )

@@peterlinddk Exactly. 1967 was the same year BCPL came out. So the issue was not that ASCII was 7 bits, it was that many potential users weren't up-to-date with the latest ASCII revision. Since the characters were new-to-ASCII, their meanings weren't as established. I wonder whether that was a factor in choosing them?

⁠thank you, I'll fix that next time

@@MarkRendle I've dug a bit deeper, and I think your explanation of the relationship of $( $) to {} is actually incorrect in a different way, because $( was the original form and { was an extension. The 1967 manual does not include curly braces: www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bcpl.pdf only $( (see PDF page 7) and the use of {} was an extension that may have originated with TENEX BCPL www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bbn/tenex/TenexBCPL_1974.pdf. A recent manual by Martin says "Historically BCPL used the symbols $( and $) to bracket commands and declarations...BCPL has been extended to allow all untagged section brackets to be replaced by { and } as appropriate." www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/bcplman.pdf It also seems likely that CPL was short for "Combined Programming Language" based on the 1967 manual, and Wikipedia claims the B is short for "Basic" but does not cite a source.

Wild guess: Microsoft might have forced VBA into internet explorer and what a ride that would have been! 😂

What language?

@@GeorgeTsiros C, Pascal, actually any language that allows nested loops and conditionals.

Deep nesting and tricky cleanup, plus logic saying if shouldn't happen happens goto cleanup: is a classic symptom of using large omnibus functions.

​@@RobBCactiveeverything looks clean and simple in tutorials. Somtimes real life ain't that simple

@@seven9766 I have written plenty of software and seen plenty of excuses, you cannot BS me!! My most esteemed colleagues heartily approved of me shrinking code modules. Furthermore I can tell you every page fault cost a lot more than failing to use subroutines

JavaScript has strings, boolean and numbers. From Mozilla... (if you study Comp. Sci. you'll realise floating point is fundamentally broken) The Number type is a double-precision 64-bit binary format IEEE 754 value. It is capable of storing positive floating-point numbers between 2-1074 (Number.MIN_VALUE) and 21024 (Number.MAX_VALUE) as well as negative floating-point numbers between -2-1074 and -21024, but it can only safely store integers in the range -(253 − 1) (Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER) to 253 − 1 (Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER). Outside this range, JavaScript can no longer safely represent integers; they will instead be represented by a double-precision floating point approximation. You can check if a number is within the range of safe integers using Number.isSafeInteger().

"Number" beeing THE type for all sorts of numeric operations is counterintuitive, leads to all sorts of errors, quirks and ugly workarounds. Im with him there and i also like the pun. :-)

@@spot997 My favourite is C.

he's no Dylan Beattie, but i do like to watch him rant