In defence of Douglas Crockford
I&#x27;ve only seen Crockford once in person, years ago [0], and though I never heard of him and his curmudgeonly-approach to JavaScript, I came away with a very favorable impression of him (and JS in general).<p>So I&#x27;m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, out of sentimentality. At the same time, I know that one speech and&#x2F;or book is not enough (if anything ever is) to judge whether someone has or hasn&#x27;t been harmful to people who are not me.<p>But after reading the original critique on Medium, and the OP&#x27;s transcription of when Crockford allegedly &quot;slut-shames the audience&quot;, I don&#x27;t feel convinced to have a negative impression of Crockford. I&#x27;m not saying that the original complainant isn&#x27;t justified in their critique or that there isn&#x27;t more to the story, because I know that things are different in person. But I could also be sympathetic towards the OP&#x27;s defense of Crockford.<p>In terms of Nodevember&#x27;s decision, well, they have different prerogatives when running a conference. And having a speaker who allegedly so openly derides other speakers is definitely something they have to think about in ways that I as an individual do not.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;original.livestream.com&#x2F;etsy&#x2F;video?clipId=pla_1463e546-47ed-4a93-b59a-bd52b236e8b8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;original.livestream.com&#x2F;etsy&#x2F;video?clipId=pla_1463e54...</a><p>edit: One thing I personally find disingenuous about the OP&#x27;s writeup is their appeal to the dictionary definition of &quot;promiscuous&quot; to defend Crockford. I guess it&#x27;s just up to people&#x27;s opinion, but I felt that Crockford was clearly using &quot;promiscuous&quot; in the first sense -- &quot;indiscriminate mingling or association&quot;. I&#x27;ve never even heard of the second sense, and very little in Crockford&#x27;s transcribed statement seems to suggest why &quot;promiscuous&quot; would be the right word to use instead of something like &quot;heterogeneous&quot;.<p>That said, I also don&#x27;t feel that Crockford&#x27;s statement was slut-shaming. Saying, &quot;Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web...&quot;<p>But that&#x27;s not what he says at all. You could read a sexual connotation to what he says, but the words he use is very much about being indiscriminate about security and identity. He even states that there is a benefit to promiscuity -- &quot;because you could go from one thing to another and discover stuff and start forming relationships&quot; and directly implies there&#x27;s a tradeoff with the security of commitment.