Jeremy Ashkenas JavaScript Libraries Retrospective
2 videos · score: 15,871 · first seen Jun 10, 2026
A retrospective on Jeremy Ashkenas's JavaScript libraries—Underscore.js, CoffeeScript, and Backbone.js—has sparked discussion, with Fireship arguing Ashkenas is an underrated pioneer whose ideas (like arrow functions and MVC patterns) were absorbed into modern JavaScript, while 3Blue1Brown's unrelated compression theory video is being mistakenly grouped into the conversation; the trend is gaining traction as developers rediscover how Ashkenas's work laid the groundwork for today's JavaScript ecosystem.
Reinventing Entropy | Compression is Intelligence Part 1
The video tutorial reframes large language model pre-training as optimal text compression by mathematically equating cross-entropy loss with Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, laying groundwork for evaluating the 'compression is intelligence' claim.
The forgotten developer who saved JavaScript...
A retrospective argues that Jeremy Ashkenas's creation of Underscore.js, CoffeeScript, and Backbone.js (2009–2010) saved JavaScript from its early deficiencies, with his ideas later absorbed into the language, making him a forgotten foundational figure.