Shell scripts, JavaScript pedantry, CSS fixations, Java debugging, and the rest of the polyglotism.
A couple of quick ones:
// Date -> Number:
var d = +(new Date());
// 1281743590756
typeof d;
// number
// almost anything -> String
d += “”;
// “1281743590756”
typeof d;
// string
// anything -> Boolean
d = !!d;
// true
typeof d;
// boolean
What are…
Following up on the Google JavaScript Style Guide that made the rounds recently: I did a couple of passes through the document and absorbed as much of it as I could 1. After discussing the style guide with a few peers, I thought that it might make sense to provide some annotations–in part for personal […]
more on JavaScript type quirks: A good companion piece to “why you should basically never use the Number constructorâ€, arriving at many of the same conclusions by many of the same methods.  However, I would disagree that the issue is with the equa…
In the realm of technical, programming-related, computer science-type books, The Joy of Clojure is a bit of an oddity. And this is a very good thing. WHAT THE BOOK IS NOT: The Joy of Clojure is not a beginner’s introduction to the language. The Joy of Clojure is not a glorified appendix of methods and […]
Each Second Counts, or Not:
The moral of the story here is to think simple when trying to optimize code, otherwise we end up going to far into optimizing and actually make the code more complex and likely slower, but this does not mean that the code w…
Inspired by some recent entanglements with a vendor’s API: The type coercion will ultimately work in your favor but the main point is that the type coercion has to take place in the first place. Granted, it is probably an edge case 1 to do something like: …but you never know. There’s some strange code […]
Have you ever wanted (as an object-oriented JavaScript developer) to work with an object before you had an instance of it? For example, perhaps there’s a method that you would like to call without going through the overhead of instantiating the object 1. How would you go about doing this? Can you invoke myWidget.doSomeStuff() if […]
While reading Nicholas Zakas’ High Performance JavaScript, it occurred to me that there were actually two different reviews that I wanted to write. So, rather than try to reconcile them into one review, I’ll simply apply them here as an ordered list. (1) To continue with the JavaScript University metaphor (from my review of Zakas’ […]
While I was reading this, I liked to imagine that I was at university and that Douglas Crockford was the insanely popular genius professor that showed up late for lectures, and then either spoke too fast or else mumbled a lot, and then locked himself in his office refusing to answer the door during office […]