Joe’s Blog

For many a developer JavaScript is nothing more than an old, buggy, unstable, and decrypted language from yesteryear. Like a skeptical Nathanael puzzling over Jesus Christ, these developers ask the age decade old question: How can anything good come out of JavaScript? And like a modern-day Philip, a growing number of influential engineers are eagerly proclaiming “come and see!”

Much of JavaScript’s sketchy reputation is no fault of the language at all, but instead can be laid squarely at the feet of browser makers and their implementations of the web’s Document Object Model (DOM). Since the DOM is outside the realm of the core JavaScript language itself it is hardly wise to attribute the failings of these platforms to JavaScript. If anything the persistent buggyness of web browsers is a tribute to the power of JavaScript in overcoming these wide ranging and browser dependent problems via libraries such as YUI, Dojo, and Prototype. JavaScript is unique in being the only language forced to work on such a wide variety of truly hostile platforms and, as we’ve seen over the last four or five years, to do it all with both extreme simplicity and kicking style.

For those who haven’t yet joined the reformation I wanted to list 3 of the best articles on the topic that I’ve found. These are invaluable resources illustrating the function, the power, and the prestige of possibly the world’s most under-appreciated language.

1. The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language

The article often credited with restarting everyone’s interest in JavaScript. Douglas Crockford works at Yahoo and is also the man behind JSON and JSLint.

2. A re-introduction to JavaScript

Since JavaScript has been largely static in terms of features for the last few years many developers have been forced to roll their own methods to do both simple and complex tasks. Thankfully JavaScript provides prototypes with which you can modify and append new methods to objects. Modify the String.prototype and add a reverse method and boom, every string in your application now has that method! This is easily the best article I’ve seen outlining how JavaScript is constructed as a language. It shows, in a very practical way, how to use simple and yet sometimes confusing features such as inner functions, closers, and objects.

3. HyperScript: A 16-line hack to make the JS DOM API a tad more humane

As many have pointed out, this type of script isn’t particular new or novel. But that doesn’t stop it from being absolutely amazing. I’ve yet to find a smaller and yet more astounding example of how you can encapsilate functionality within JavaScript and create brand new APIs on the fly. Elzr’s 16 lines of code loop over every type of HTML element and create new global functions for each. table(), li(), b(), div(), form(), you name it. Now you don’t have to deal with any of the browser’s hocky createElement syntax.

4. Bonus: YUI Theater

Douglas Crockford’s free videos are well worth your time and provide much better information than you are ever likely to get from a book or a class. The videos provide a good overview of the history of JavaScript, the good parts, the bad parts, and why it is and it should be the most popular language in the world.

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