Posts tagged 'javascript'
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Today's partner: Max
I'm kind of liking JavaScript, which is surprising on day 2. We'll see what day 30 looks like, but so far, it's been forgiving.
Today was another example of re-creating Ruby code with JS, but emphasizing the features specific to JS—mostly callbacks and (more) closures. The paradigms are different, and JS is much more verbose (less of a profusion of one-line methods and more C-style 20 line blocks of
if-elses and explicit loops). Which means that we're a lot more "productive" in the "productivity = lines of code" sense, and it was easier to make each individual line work, but I get the sense that finding an error will be harder in the future.Which wasn't really a problem today - most of our issues boiled down to "Does this one-word function exist in JavaScript? No? Damn." - and between Max and I, we were able to handle pretty much everything there was to know about callbacks. We ended up finishing by break, and sort of trying to find something to do with ourselves to make productive use of the last hour and a half.
I don't think I like node, but we can make it do what we need to. What's most frustrating is that when you do have a real problem (debugging or experimenting), building up workable state to the point that you can try to find the problem is much more difficult. I really hope we get exposure to a testing framework or something for JS so that we can automate a lot of the process of iterative development.
Other than that, the module packaging in JS is ugly, but given the power and portability of JS overall, I think I'll be able to survive.
All in all, I'm enjoying JS, but what I'm really looking forward to is the power of JQuery and .css. Is it odd that selectors are so interesting to me?
Me, a typography nerd… liking text styling… who would have thought.
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Today's partner: Jesus
Well, that was surprising. Javascript, right now, feels like dirty C with closures, which is well up my alley.
Javascript (aka ECMAscript) is NOT Java, btw.
For overview, we did a lot of basic stuff—array manipulation, iteration and recursion, and so on. The thinking was pretty standard, considering that we'd seen some of the problems on the prep work, in the first week, and again on the first assessment… at this point, my brain is pretty much prepped to think about how to solve this particular set of problems.
I was kind of thinking the other day that I'd like to be able to play with C/C++ again one day, and … jeez, the syntax of Javascript is all C. It's not surprising if the story we were told in lecture was true, viz. the creator of JS having to design the language spec in basically a week. "Good artists create, great artists steal," as they say, and the best place to steal from in the programming world seems to be C.
I was afraid that it would be a lot more troublesome than it was, given how many JS readings we have (and how many I didn't quite read). Other than some hair-pulling over trying to figure out exactly what a closure is, I think the day went pretty smoothly. My partner was having a slightly harder time with the algorithms than I was, so I tried to pace myself to allow him the time to get more out of the day, but I can feel that I'll probably look more intensely at JS over the weekend than Rails or Ruby. This all even though most of my to-do list consists of lingering Ruby and Rails work that I want to tie off.
Ahead of us: more .css fundamentals, a lot more JS readings, and then putting it all together. After the semi-slog that was Rails, I'm okay moving on, even if it is a LOT to process.