October 21, 2003
JavaScript Training

OK, Andy, EMCA Script then. ;-)

It turns out that the JavaScript Training is pretty good, and the trainer is coping pretty well with the disparate needs of my disparate team. We covered a bit of CSS and DOM as well as JS yesterday. By end of play today, I reckon we'll all know enough to achieve most of what one might want to do, and know where to go to find out the rest.

Dan and I are tearing through the examples, while the others are proceeding a little more slowly, but we are keeping together fairly well in terms of subject matter. I knew pretty much all of this stuff in theory, but practise is a little different, of course.

Bob, the trainer, and I have made a few discoveries along the way, mostly to do with the way that IE handles CSS. I had put a !DOCTYPE into all my HTML files, pretty much without thinking. This put IE into standards mode, and some of the examples didn't work. Nor did they work in Firebird. Took a while to work that one out, but having done so, it was useful stuff to know.

Posted to JavaScript by Simon Brunning at October 21, 2003 09:04 AM
Comments

If you feel like you're taking a step backwards and learning a lame language, consider this quote: "The august Waldemar Horwat -- who was at one time the lead Javascript developer at AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape -- once told me that he considered Javascript to be just another syntax for Common Lisp."

Whether by design or accident, Javascript has full Higher-Order functions and closures, and other nifty features to make programming interesting.

Read http://w3future.com/html/stories/hop.xml and impress your trainer.

Posted by: Ralph Richard Cook on October 21, 2003 03:05 PM

Or, given the current flame war on comp.lang.python you could just go running for the hills.

"This week I shall mainly be doing all of my client side scripting in Python" ;-)

Posted by: Andy Todd on October 21, 2003 04:39 PM

The Lisp one, or the 'Wise Guy' one?

Or are they just different fronts in the same flame-war? Since I'm reading neither, I don't know. Or care...

Posted by: Simon Brunning on October 21, 2003 04:59 PM

The mere mention of Lisp has me wishing for a killfile function in Thunderbird these days.

Anyway, just because you *can* program Javascript like a functional language doesn't mean that you *have* to.

Posted by: Andy Todd on October 21, 2003 05:04 PM

Every Language War Ever: http://www.deftcode.com/archives/every_language_war_ever.html

;-)

Posted by: Simon Brunning on October 22, 2003 09:42 AM

Simon, hate to picky (well I don't but never mind) but its ECMA Script, not EMCA Script - http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm

Posted by: Andy Todd on October 23, 2003 04:00 PM
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