JavaScript

Lately, I've been keeping current with my programming skill by learning JavaScript. Douglas Crockford aptly called JavaScript, The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language. Here's how Crockford put it:

JavaScript's C-like syntax, including curly braces and the clunky for statement, makes it appear to be an ordinary procedural language. This is misleading because JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp or Scheme than with C or Java. It has arrays instead of lists and objects instead of property lists. Functions are first class. It has closures. You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens.

I got to fall in love with Lisp at CMU, and now with JavaScript I have a powerful, Lisp-like language that comes free on my browser. Also interesting is that JavaScript is a prototype-based object-oriented language.

Nevertheless, grokking this language takes experience, and one of the purposes of this blog is to document some of the lessons learned from the school of hard knocks.