JavaScript

Welcome to the Deep Dives.

We're taking a stack of notes drawn entirely from this really fascinating book, Get Programming with JavaScript by John R. Larson.

It's a great foundational text.

It really is.

That would be absurd.

You pack them all into one single container, you pass the whole kit around, and when you need something, you open the kit and pull out just the scissors.

And in JavaScript, that container is called an object.

An object, okay.

Static analysis is at the beginning.

Well, yes and no, because, you know, most of the time, each one of those stages, if it's using an interpreted component, you know, typically JavaScript, each one of those is going to be highly obfuscated.

And so, you know, you're using, you're falling back on these tools as you're processing through each one of the stages.

And this gets really kind of interesting because North Korea, for example, you know, their typical, typical kind of contagious interview is, Kill Chain is typically five or six stages.

Yeah.

Well, the Bash...

Bash basically would identify which operating system it was and then would go through all the machination to set up the Python or JavaScript environment to then download, you know, Beaver Tail, Otter Cookie, or Invisible Ferret, which are kind of the three classic tools that...

But now they're doing more of that.

Things are very delicate if you have tons of clients that use it.

I mean, cloud by software clients, right? Python code and all sorts of, you know, JavaScript and other code.

So you'll be tempted to do that.

But allow yourself to be just...

They seem to be trying to make it friendly.

The source says it uses common languages like Java, C++, Gob, JavaScript, and it has these things called atomic services.

Atomic services.

Yeah.

One pattern that also emerging now, which is relatively new, like what we do quite a lot, Nowadays, you would have, for instance, GitHub action, like using GitHub as example, and it's possible to install cloud code or codecs to the GitHub action runner.

So it's just a JavaScript package.

And then you would basically run codecs or JavaScript to run the review for you.

in one way or another.

If you want to see an example of that, we have in 5XL, go to GitHub, 5XL, and there will be a repository, Shared Workflows.

It's also possible.

I've seen people doing that a lot on CICD, for instance, because in the end of the day, most of those coding agents, they're just JavaScript programs that could be quickly installed in the GitHub Action Runner, for instance.

And then if you have your private roles, you can consume through the role, then you can do a code review.

We actually have a blog post that I will... link to the show notes like one of the consultants in Firefox self-wrote it where how you can define the role and that will be like so basically you can set a cup uh through the i am on uh bedrock spending which was like not the obvious thing to do like it's not very obvious how to do it but it's actually possible and then you can say like well start declining requests on the i am level when we like spend three thousand

programming language for the web.

So before there was JavaScript, there was, I think it was called WebGL.

That was him as well.

So yeah, he was just this amazingly creative guy.

And so it had its own web server built in Lisp from the ground up.

So back in the day, HTTP was very simple, right? So it wasn't, you know, when you say, oh, had its own embedded web server, it sounds like this huge effort, but in fact, it was a very sort of like limited amount of code necessary to do that.

So yeah, the front end was HTML and JavaScript and CSS, just like we'd expect today.

Um, and the backend was Lisp and somehow it all worked together.

The Internet was changing.

HTML5 and JavaScript were becoming capable of doing many things that Flash once handled.

Browsers were becoming less dependent on plugins and gaming itself was moving towards smartphones.

So the last one was particularly devastating, let's be honest.

10, 20 years ago, when we wanted to make a software or do something with technology, you had to talk to it in code.

You had to use JavaScript, HTML, whatever it might be.

If you can speak English, you can use AI.

You just need to be able to ask it the right questions.