Learning to Love JavaScript
Douglas Crockford calls JavaScript the world’s most misunderstood programming language. After the past week at work, I would have to agree with him.
Monday morning my supervisor came to me and informed me that the screens I would be developing for the next five days were going to involve heavy amounts of JavaScript. The requirements were dripping with superfluous effects, animation, and other sorts of DOM magic.
Needless to say, I wasn’t happy. Sure, I knew how to do it all. But just because I am able to code it, doesn’t necessarily mean that I enjoy coding it. After all, what is there to enjoy about it? Aside from all the issues of getting the code to work cross in one browser, you still have to be considerate of 4 or 5 other A-Grade browsers. Besides, JavaScript code is weird anyway. I mean, who actually gets that language anyway?
Wow. It’s amazing how much change can occur in just 5 days when you immerse yourself in a particular technology. The first few days were horrible. I tripped over so many things when I finally wised up and decided to use the YUI library. At that moment it clicked. For some reason, using the YUI library made me understand what JavaScript was really all about.
As of about 3:00 PM Wednesday afternoon I saw JavaScript for what it really was. I saw a beautiful, elegant language where I once saw a simple toy. I learned of the incredible amount of freedom that a functional language affords. Lambdas, closures, object literals and a handful of patterns all became a common site in my code. What a turn around!
JavaScript has many problems. Don’t just take my word for it. Watch some of Crockford’s presentations on YUI Theater. But despite language issues, poor implementations, and a terrible reputation, JavaScript is truly a beautiful and extremely expressive language that every web developer should take time to learn.
I will be giving a talk about this at BarCamp Orlando tomorrow (well, today). If you’re in Central Florida, come check it out. The slides are available for download below.
Slide Download
2 Responses to Learning to Love JavaScript
Ryan Price:
PHP gets a lot of guff too, but it can be awesome in the hands of the proper master. Javascript, perhaps more so. Just look at all the different “AJAX” libraries out there now - YUI included and the off-the-walls stuff you can accomplish with them - so much more powerful and elegant than ::whisper:: flash (shhh!).
Comments are closed. Sorry.
James Williams:
On September 24th, 2007 at 2:08 pm #
Thanks for letting me use your laptop for my preso!