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Showing posts from August, 2010

I @#$%&* JavaScript!

I am by no means an expert web developer or particularly familiar with JavaScript, which might influence my distaste for it. My experience is mostly from making small changes in moderately complex existing applications. JavaScript was originally intended as a small domain-specific glue-language to ad some client-side behavior to otherwise largely server-side web applications: do some client-side input validation, dynamically modify the page based on user input, etc. But with the growing popularity of AJAX style web-applications, much of the JavaScript client-side code has grown into monstrosities - mostly because of a lack of inherent support for modularity and encapsulation. One of the most important properties a language environment should support in order to scale to large projects is a way to divide an conquer. There should be a way for one programmer to build upon the work of others without having to understand the implementation details of these building blocks which might be