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JavaScript Runs the World—Maybe Even Literally

In defense of a much-mocked programming language.

The development of the language is steered by the rather unremarkably named Technical Committee 39 under a Geneva-based standards organization called Ecma International. Meetings, once routinely held in the San Francisco Bay Area, have expanded to other places such as Bergen, Galicia, and Tokyo, as if to resist the notion that the tech industry can be metonymized by Silicon Valley. Likewise, reading old C code feels like engaging in the hermeneutics of ancient script, while Coq demands the exactitude of proving mathematical theorems.

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