Quote Originally Posted by Dr Unne View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Shoeberto View Post
My big issue with it is just that it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, so it's kind of a lightweight scripting language, and kind of an extensive object-oriented language, which makes it pretty slushy for my liking. Coming from a language as strict as C++, it's a big adjustment that I still haven't made.
JS makes sense if you treat it as a functional language. It was designed based on Scheme and Self. Brendan Eich made the syntax look like C so as not to scare people away from it, or else it'd probably be a full-fledged Lisp.

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford (the guy who invented JSON) is a good book. Short and very practical. It tells you what parts of JS to avoid.
Interesting. I'm going to keep that book in mind - maybe see if we can get it added to the company library. JSON is one JavaScript construct that I actually find to be incredibly clever and useful (in fact, it's playing a significant role in a fairly large new feature I'm co-programming right now). My previous exposure to functional languages was only in my undergrad, and I thought it was interesting, but the mindset required never clicked for me as being practical beyond academic curiosity.