In It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Scoping in CoffeeScript and JavaScript, I translated a small snippet of JavaScript almost directly to CoffeeScript. The point was to compare the way JavaScript and CoffeeScript scope variables, so it was necessary to reproduce the code and variables almost directl...

“I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks, been working me buns off for bands…” “I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like the most of us…very hard to explain why you’re mad, even if you’re not mad…” –“Speak to Me,” Nick Mason coffeescript CoffeeScript, ...

Some people will tell you that JavaScript isn’t Scheme. Of course it isn’t: Scheme is Scheme, JavaScript is JavaScript. There are excellent reasons why JavaScript is nothing like Scheme. Pretty much everything that makes Scheme Scheme is nowhere to be found in JavaScript. One of the fundamental idea...

This is an unfinished work. I am still trying to think through all of the implications of binding names to entities using test suites. It seems fairly obvious how it would work with Ruby Gems. But does it scale downwards? Can I specify a function to be called by contract? How about a class? A constr...

Why yes, it is my birthday today. Wondering what to get me? Just a second, some people are singing… Okay. It’s simple, really. I’d like yet another programming language. It doesn’t have to have entirely new ideas, but if it is going to recycle some old ideas, I’d really like it if it recycled some o...

functional Michael Fogus has just published Functional JavaScript: Introducing Functional Programming with Underscore.js. He is also writing a series of essays introducing people to existing resources for writing JavaScript in a functional style (or with a dollop of functional on top). I was pleased...

There are many definitions of “elegance,” but with respect to programming, I like to define it as, “The degree to which a set of features scale.” The more things you can do with a few features, the better. One of the easiest way to make a set of features scale is to make them composeable in as many ...

You’re interviewing for a Ruby job, and the interviewer poses the following question: You’re reviewing some code and find the line config ||= config. What do you infer? Well, what DO you infer? The author of that code is insane. The author is sane, was trying to __________ The author is sane, but di...

Chris Sturgill wrote a perfectly sane blog post called Tests Are Overhyped. His thesis is that some people take testing to extremes where they are no longer beneficial, and slavishly follow test-centric practices for “cargo cult” reasons rather without any introspection over what they are trying to ...

Very roughly speaking, functional programming (“FP”) and object-oriented programming (“OOP”) have similar levels of expressive power and similar abilities to encapsulate programs into smaller parts that can be combined and recombined. The biggest difference between the two “schools of thought” conce...

Revised to change some of the nomenclature! “Proud to say I work with a team of developers who value explicit code over clever code”–Michael R. Bernstein Me too! And if we are all thinking the exact same thing when we read or write the words “explicit” and “clever,” there is nothing else to say on t...

in Trampolines in JavaScript, we used a ridiculously simple factorial function to understand how trampolining works. To recap, we started with: function factorial (n) { return n ? n * factorial(n - 1) : 1 } The major problem given for this code is that stack-based languages like JavaScript consume o...

A trampoline is a loop that iteratively invokes thunk-returning functions (continuation-passing style). A single trampoline is sufficient to express all control transfers of a program; a program so expressed is trampolined, or in trampolined style; converting a program to trampolined style is trampo...

With the demise of Posterous, I was motivated to “get my blogging house in order” and move all of my blogging onto Github. I’ve written about using Jekyll and Github Pages elsewhere,1 but the short form is: I have my own domains via registrar gandi.net. They point to Github’s IP. Each blog gets a re...

It had been a long and gruelling process, but the ThinkWare team had whittled the virtual stack of resumes down to Bob and Carol. “Bob was great,” said Alice, “The interview got off to a great start when I fizzbuzzed him with Fibonacci. He asked whether I wanted an Enumerator or iterative function. ...

Previous: A Surreal Encounter With a Winged Elephant Moses led Maude to a sandy riverbank, where a number of birds had congregated. Maude watched for a few moments, and she saw that all along the riverbank, birds were arrayed, each with a small territory. Each bird had collected river pebbles of var...

This morning I was perusing /r/javascript, where I saw an announcement for version 2.0.0 of the Craft JavaScript utility belt library. Unlike other libraries, Craft is not afraid to extend the prototypes for built-in “classes” such as Function. For example, Craft provides Function.prototype.attach, ...

Today, Michael Fogus announced that O’Reilly will be publishing his new book, Functional JavaScript (It’s available for preorder at a discount now). Fogus is no wide-eyed newcomer just discovering functional programming, he’s the author of the Lemonad library for advanced functional programming in J...

Previously in A Surreal Encounter with a Winged Elephant, Maude learned about proper flocks of birds that could be ordered into “ranks” based on the birds they personally knew in the flock. She learned that such flocks could be used to model the natural numbers and that one could perform addition wi...

Previous: A long time ago, in a village far, far away Moses flew along, showing the way to The Magnificent Smullyan Bird’s nest. As they walked along, Maude saw the most curious sight: A small winged elephant perched on a nest.1 “What is that!?” Moses clicked his beak. “That is Horton Jr., or just p...

A long time ago, in a village far, far away, there was a young, intelligent woman named Maude.1 Maude lived in a village beside a river that ran through mogotés of arable land, that was rich and ripe for planting tobacco and coffee. A woman of Maude’s resourcefulness could easily live a long and pro...

I was participating in wroc_love.rb last week-end, and Steve Klabnik put up a slide mentioning partial application and currying. “The difference between them is not important right now,” he said, pressing on. And it wasn’t. But here we are, it’s a brand new day, and we’ve already read five different...

first, constructors must return their instance Jeremy Ashkenas recently announced that CoffeeScript 1.5 is out. One of its changes concerns constructors created with CoffeeScript’s class keyword. It used to be possible to write this: ### class Weird constructor: -> return { exclamation: "That's Stra...

Programming interviews often include a “Fizzbuzz” test, some simple programming task that is intended to establish that the candidate can, in fact, program something trivial. It isn’t intended as a deep architectural dive or as an algorithms challenge. Under ideal, non-pressure situations it shouldn...

Much has been made of the lack of diversity in the technology field. While there are many causes for it and not all of the factors represent intentional or even systemic discrimination, there are from time to time disturbing incidents that make me despair. One such has just been revealed to me, and ...

Dr. Hilbert “Bertie” David grows tired of blogging about JavaScript, and decides to cash in on the seemingly inexhaustible supply of impressionable young minds seeking to “Learn JavaScript in Five Days.” He opens his Grand JavaScript School on the shores of the Andaman Sea in Thailand, and with some...

Why I’ve moved back to proper blogging, and how I’m using Github Pages to do it A little more than four years ago, I tried an experiment: On October 27, 2008 I pushed some text in markdown format to Github, and a new kind of bloggy thing called Homoiconic was born. As a blog, it was lame. Markdown i...

Prior to joining Unspace Interactive, one of our developers worked on an “interesting” project, a project that taught them many lessons. One of those lessons was to beware of “duck programming.” Before we explain that term, let’s have a look at the project and get a feel for what the designers were ...

In the board game Mouse Trap, the players build an elaborate Rube Goldberg Machine. Wikipedia explains: The player turns the crank (A) which rotates the gears (B) causing the lever (C) to move and push the stop sign against the shoe (D), which tips the bucket holding the metal ball (E) which rolls d...

the curtain opens on act one A software manager is brought into a doomed project. It is hopelessly behind, the requirements have changed so often they are effectively kept in chat history instead of JIRA, and Office Space references and memes pepper every conversation. The previous manager resigned....