Posts about javascript

If you’ve had any contact with JavaScript code, you’re probably very familiar with how to define and call functions, but are you aware of of how many different ways you can define a function? This is a common challenge of writing and maintaining tests in Test262—especially when a new feature comes into contact with any […]

Continue Reading

The Many Faces of Functions in JavaScript

Illustration courtesy Matt McLaughlin. It is 9:18 AM on August 21, 2021. You have just finished eating your space-breakfast, and you’re ready to get back to work maintaining the web presence for Omni Consumer Products. After about an hour, you find your latest change fails an acceptance test. It turns out to be a bug […]

Continue Reading

JavaScript Developers: Watch Your Language!

• Tagged in:
• web standards

Recently I saw a tweet about the relationship between values in JavaScript saying that greater or equals means nothing. The tweet reported the following results: null >= 0 // true null > 0 // false null == 0 // false My experience with the JavaScript language makes me believe that everything has a meaning, even […]

Continue Reading

Equality and Relational Operators: Comparing the strange relationship between null and 0

• Tagged in:
• javascript,
• programming language design,
• software development process

Sometimes I’m not satisfied with the way things are. I wish they could be a little bit different, just for a moment. I deal with this desire in my personal life by sighing and gazing through a rain-dotted window. When writing code, I take a more productive approach: I use seams. During application development, there […]

Continue Reading

Seams in JavaScript

• Tagged in:
• software development process,
• testing

Update: This proposal now has two open bugs for implementation, on V8 and SpiderMonkey. https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3915 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135708 In this article, I’ll explore the process of adding syntax to a programming language by going through the process of designing a new JavaScript exponentiation operator, which I’ve submitted to TC39 for consideration in ES7. In many programming languages, […]

Continue Reading

Designing an Exponentiation Operator for JavaScript

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• web standards

I’m honored to have been named lead maintainer of JSHint. Following in Anton‘s footsteps, I’m excited to carry on his vision for the project and see it forward. In addition to overseeing regular maintenance of the project, my primary goal will be to prepare JSHint for ES6. Stewarding this work will be an exciting challenge, […]

Continue Reading

JSHint At Bocoup

• Tagged in:
• open source,
• tools and workflow,
• web standards

Many readers will recognize the following program, which is an adaptation of The Little Schemer’s Y combinator implementation; written and published by Douglas Crockford in 2003 to demonstrate the commonalities found between JavaScript and Scheme. If you’re unfamiliar with recursion, fixed point combinators or the “Y combinator”, take a look at the Wikipedia article and […]

Continue Reading

The Little JavaScripter, Revisited

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• web standards

Why would Bocoup, a company whose charge is to “move the open web forward,” be publishing an article on something so nefarious-sounding as “information hiding”? An article titled “Free Love & Information in JavaScript” would seem much more apt for this blog. Trust me: if information hiding were an inherently immoral practice, I wouldn’t know […]

Continue Reading

Information Hiding in JavaScript

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications

I’ve just returned from the future, and I have a lot to share with you. World news, sports scores, market changes, all that stuff can wait. First, we need to talk about third-party JavaScript. There’s a great deal of browser technology on the way that will affect the way you write code. Here, I’ll focus […]

Continue Reading

Third-Party JavaScript Development: The Future!

• Tagged in:
• client side,
• performance,
• testing,
• web applications

(In a previous article, I introduced a convenient method for shipping stylesheets with your third-party JavaScript application.) When styling content in your third-party JavaScript application, you have a unique challenge to overcome: interference. The publisher may have used any number of techniques to define styles, and many of them threaten to modify the appearance of […]

Continue Reading

Third-Party JavaScript Development: CSS Defensive Techniques

• Tagged in:
• design,
• performance,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications