Javascript is a language made by philosophers, for philosophers

Matic Jurglič
3 min readMar 14, 2015

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For centuries it’s been widely known the origin of Javascript dates back to the Ancient Greek times. At that time, Javascript was only used by the selected few high level thinkers who gradually incorporated this concept into the early Netscape browsers.

To fully grasp Javascript’s peculiar behaviour, properties and concepts, one must accept the fact this language was shaped, influenced and forged by philosopher presence throughout the vast centuries of thinking man’s history, starting with the cultural bloom in Ancient Greece.

Aristotle, the Father of Javascript

Many young, naive Javascript developers have, or sooner or later will, encounter the dreadful “undefined is not a function” issue. They will resort to various philosopher forums, like, StackOverflow or ask their fellow thinkers to solve this issue, but little to they know what a godsend this actually is.

The original evangelist of “undefined is not a function” mindset was - you guessed it right - Aristotle. Back in those days they used so called “QueryJQscript” and unskilled developers oftentimes mistakenly called their functions upon something that did not exist. Each time that happened, the null pointers caused machine to fell into existential crisis and everything blew up.

Aristotle stepped up and argued: “If the function call does not allude to “real definition” (in which case, what on earth might it mean — by a ‘real definition’ is meant a “definition of a thing”, often or usually in philosophy of an “abstract thing”), then what does it allude to? He tucked in his toga and introduced the “undefined is not a function” type error. Together with his drinking buddy Plato, creator of AngularJS, they implemented the famous “object is not a function” handler as well and laid the cornerstones for modern Javascript as we know it today.

Fast forward to the newer age. Nothing much happened in between (because of the cold war). The elite hacker group comprised of well known members Voltaire, Descartes (who were later succeeded by Locke and Kierkegaard) secretly manifested their ideological beliefs into core Javascript code. They were extremely enlightened and argued people are too blinded, so in order for everyone to be as enlightened as possible, the Javascript must also be enlightened. They forcefully introduced various enlightenments — the group pulled off something incredible, known as “Unrevertible Force Merged Pull Request”, earlier introduced by Pythagoras. Some examples of nasty stuff Javascript is doing because of their sneaky interference:

According to some philosophers, Maximum is smaller than Minimum.

The group later decided to move on to work on Java applets technology, which enlightened the web even further.

Most people are not aware of the fact that Slavoj Žižek, formerly a very talented Pascal developer, founder of HotScripts, who introduced “Anti-Semantics” software pattern and is award winning author of “Give Javascript to all the people and kill all the capitalists” book series, is the person whom they owe everything to. He single handedly beat the living shit out of the W3Schools maintainers, took ECMAScript under his wing and set the standards for modern Javascript. Fear not, the Javascript future is bright.

Even though this is just a quick course through the Javascript’s history, it tells a lot about the nature of and different aspects of people who built this technology, so you, dear reader, can better understand why is it happening, when you don’t know what’s happening.

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