In Ingrid Lunden’s post about Douglas Crockford departing Yahoo for PayPal, she made several serious errors, most of which have been corrected by now. In an earlier version of the article, she called Crockford a Java icon, and after being called out in the comments, she changed it to (correctly) read JavaScript.
As one commenter pointed out, “Java is to JavaScript as Ham is to Hamster.”
The blunder remains obvious despite the correction in other parts of the article, such as where Ms. Lunden mentions “Java (not JavaScript) is used in featurephones, Android and web interfaces,” and “PayPal is ‘moving rapidly’ from C++ to Java as a backend technology.” Both of which are totally irrelevant to Crockford’s hiring.
Silly mistakes (and the fact that half of the article is regurgitating Crockford’s Wikipedia page) aside, what irks me the most is the total lack of both technical understanding and journalism. Lunden has a gem in the article: Edwin Aoki specifically mentions to Lunden that “[Crockford] will be partnering with [Aoki] on more ways to utilize JS both in the server and on the browser for PayPal.” (emphasis mine).
PayPal could very well be exploring/expanding their use of Node.js, a significant move in the technology community, and Lunden totally missed it!
Regardless of the poor reporting, this is an exciting time for Node developers if another big player like PayPal is putting some resources into the area.
And TechCrunch, if you’re not even going to try to report on the technology side of things, please change your name to something more suitable, like SiliconValleyGossipCrunch.