Douglas Crockford has been working single-handed on a mammoth task to document JavaScript. Now he has allowed his unfinished project to go live as a work in progress that others can contribute to.

Just in case you need reminding Douglas Crockford is known for his involvement in the development of JavaScript/EcmaScript (ES). Specific achievements are having popularized JSON, developing JSLint and JSMin and being the author of JavaScript: The Good Parts.

The idea is that despite working on it for some time on his own he needs some community help with finishing it.

In the Preface Crockford explains the situation:

I intended that The JavaScript Encyclopedia be finished when ES5 was released. Not only did I miss that deadline, but since then ES6 has been published, which was itself four years late. So it is starting to become clear that I am not going to get this done on my own. I need help.

Also in the preface he tells us:

I designed a hypertext encyclopedia format specifically for programming languages.

If this gives you a sense of deja vu, recall that Donald Knuth, when dissatisfied with the typesetting of his books, spent 9 years devising TeX, a language for typography and Metafont, a font design system, and the impact this had on his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming.

Luckily Crockford has decided to share the work in progress and to ask for help in filling out the missing and incomplete entries.

Replacing the "blahs" with useful content is what Crockford is asking others to help him with. He has created a GitHub repo where contribution can be submitted at: 

https://github.com/douglascrockford/TheJavaScriptEncyclopedia

The hypertext format makes what already exists very effective as an online resource and should also facilitate collaboration on extending it.

So should you feel like helping create the Wikipedia of JavaScript, the worlds most important programming language then you know what to do. 

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info