FOSDEM had a Web 2.0 track which I decided to sit through on the Sunday morning. By far the best talk in this track was given by Alex Russell. I didn’t have a computer with me so the only information I had before I heard the talk was that he is the project leader of the Dojo Toolkit. I was expecting his talk to be about the project but instead he gave a talk called “Functional Programming and AOP in a JavaScript Environment”. After a brief introduction to JavaScript Alex gave examples of how to implement a variety of object oriented patterns and advanced functional programming idioms such as closures and monads.

I have attended JavaScript tutorials in the past but these did not present me with a language that I would ever have wanted to use. They mainly focused on browser incompatibilities and horrible hacks to get round these. The language looked ugly. But after hearing Alex I realise that it’s not that you can’t write good code in JavaScript it’s just that lots of people choose not to or don’t know how to.

I am glad that the slides are available as not only did I not take a computer to FOSDEM but I also managed to forget to bring a notebook with me on Sunday morning.