// the find
marijnh/Eloquent-JavaScript-1st-edition
The source for http://eloquentjavascript.net
This is the source for the first edition of Eloquent JavaScript, Marijn Haverbeke's book from around 2011. It's a historical artifact — the book that taught a generation of developers to think about JavaScript properly. Nobody should be adopting this codebase; they should be reading the current edition at eloquentjavascript.net.
The book itself is genuinely good writing — Haverbeke explains closures, higher-order functions, and object-oriented patterns without dumbing them down. The inline code runner (CodeMirror embedded in the web build) was ahead of its time for interactive programming books. The custom Haskell renderer is an interesting technical choice that kept the source format clean and human-readable. Chapter examples are self-contained and runnable, which made the learning loop tight.
Last commit was 2013 — this is frozen in ES3/ES5 era JavaScript, before Promises, modules, classes, or async/await existed. The build toolchain requires GHC and a hand-rolled Haskell renderer with undocumented source format, which means you can't build it without archaeology. There are now three newer editions of this book (3rd edition covers modern JS thoroughly); using this one to learn JavaScript today would actively teach you patterns the community has moved away from. 323 stars in 13 years suggests most people correctly find the live site rather than cloning this.