Brendan Eich, JavaScript's creator, gave the opening-night keynote at last week's YUICONF 2009. His talk, "ECMA Harmony and the Future of JavaScript," related some of the technical, corporate and social processes that have marked the recent history of the language. It's a fascinating story. As the next release of ECMAScript (now ECMAScript 5.0) comes up for a vote in December, there remains some dissent, with IBM still indicating discomfort. But the prospect of ECMAScript moving ahead to a new version looks increasingly plausible. Brendan's perspective on this is both strikingly open and deeply committed. Our thanks to him for the talk and for allowing us to share it here.

If the video embed below doesn't show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater; the downloadable version is much smaller, optimized as it is for iPods, iPhones, and other handheld devices.

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• A high-resolution, transcripted version of this talk is available on the YUI Theater site

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