Lazycoder

JavaScript: A tool too sharp?

Script# (Script Sharp) – writing javascript in C#

Both Jimmy and roy have great posts discussing JavaScript. Roy is looking at it as a C# developer lured by the many, many articles about how jQuery is the only thing that makes JavaScript worth using and using Script# to abstract away some of the messiness and pain usually associated with writing JavaScript. Jimmy discusses the merits of JavaScript itself and how it has changed how he approaches writing C# code.

One thing I like to point to is a great quote I heard on Twitter

Java is to JavaScript as ham is to hamster

JavaScript actually has more in common with Scheme or Lisp than it does Java or C#. I first realized this when I saw that Douglas Crockford had re-written all of the examples in The Little Schemer
in JavaScript. It’s easy to miss that fact when you see all of the pseudo OOP noise like “var foo = new Foo();”. But when you see how trvial it is to implement something like a map method in JavaScript, you realize how powerful the language can be. Most of the hatred for JavaScript comes from two things I’ve found:

1. Broken DOM implementations – every browsers implementation of the DOM is broken in one respect or another.
2. A misunderstanding of either scope or inheritance.

Roy has a great point about the lack of good tooling surrounding JavaScript. There are excellent libraries like jQuery and PrototypeJS, but the usual tool support, intellisense, re-factoring, profiling, is a little more difficult to come by. I’ll address this in another post as I feel a lot of people are new to JavaScript and are struggling along with some substandard tools.