I probably could have named this post something like “Writing clean, validating and portable JavaScript”, but that would be no where near as catchy. The problem with “great” is it means different things to different people. I am going to show you my idea of great which may differ from many developers views, but I hope it helps someone improve their code.So what’s the point in this, why can’t you just carry on writing JavaScript as you have been for ages. It works doesn’t it? Well if you took the same opinion with a car and drove on 20 year old tires...

Attempts to verify the utility of languages stifle innovation. Christopher Mims 03/06/2012 30 Comments Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures. Well, not all of them. History can speak for itself. Via UC Irvine computer scientist Cristina Videira Lopes, who deserves credit for any insight you might get from this post, which is a gloss on her excellent, if long, Research in Programming Languages:Languages people use and love:PHP - Hacked toget...

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, Dr. Pargas was standing at the front of our data structures class talking about some data structure-y topic while an SSH session was projected on the wall in front of us. Someone asked a question, and he said something along the lines of "Well, if you want to be a real computer scientist you need to start using vi". I think he was smiling as he said it, and in hindsight his statement wasn't even slightly true, but being young and easily influenced like I was I went back to my dorm room and immediately took up training myself how to use...