David Flanagan is a programmer and the author of several O’Reilly books, including JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Java in a Nutshell, and The Ruby Programming Language. In particular, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide demonstrated how a little language seemingly thrown together in the early days of the web was capable of so much more.
In this interview with O’Reilly (conducted shortly before the JavaScript Harmony announcement, David discusses how the conception of JavaScript has evolved from little hacks and distractions to a fundamental piece of modern web applications, how the design of the language might have changed with the advent of EcmaScript 4 and EcmaScript 3.1, how the web has evolved from the early days until now, and how HTML and JavaScript might be the new BASIC.
From: http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/david-flanagan-on-javascript-2.html
