I started work at Mozilla yesterday. It has been quite a whirlwind. I'm sitting next to Brendan Eich and working with David Flanagan. David's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide was the reference I turned to when I seriously started with web programming in 2000, and when Brendan Eich wrote JavaScript I was working on server-side scripts hosted in LambdaMOO and had no idea what I wanted to do with my career. Life is strange. If I could go back in time and tell my 1995 self where I am now I don't think I would believe myself.

I'm having a lot of fun learning more about the history of JavaScript and the projects we are working on. After being so deeply embedded in the Python world for so long, it feels refreshing to venture into completely alien terrain. Some things are familiar and some things are incredibly strange. It feels very natural overall; I think if something like WebSockets had existed in 2000 I never would have discovered Python and would have stuck with JavaScript and the LambdaMOO programming language. Python was class oriented; JavaScript was prototype oriented like LambdaMOO. I needed some intermediate glue language to handle JavaScript's inability to use plain old socket objects though, and thus my love affair with Python was born.

The first project I am helping with is dom.js, a project whose aim is to implement the common browser DOM APIs in pure JavaScript. This project will be useful for a server-side implementation of the DOM for use in node.js and will also be useful as a DOM implementation for Narcissus which is just straight up JavaScript written in JavaScript.

Woah, man. Meta. I love it.

Finally there is Zaphod, which is a FireFox extension which installs Narcissus as the default JavaScript interpreter, useful for rapid prototyping of changes to JavaScript itself.