To add yet another language to the ever-expanding list of languages I know well enough to get by but have far from mastered, in the past week or two at work I've needed to play with Javascript a lot. I've long thought of Javascript as the bane of my existence, if only for the horrid browser incompatibilities you have to deal with. I hate hate hate hate writing code that needs to have a bunch of silly conditionals that change the code's behavior based on differences in the underlying platform. In this case of course the platform is a browser, but I hate it equally dealing with differences between operating systems, differences between versions of libraries, and other similar things.
The ideal situation is to use some library where someone has already worked out those platform-dependent quirks. In the case of Javascript, there's JQuery. It really does work wonders. I read recently that Google uses it for some of their sites, and I can probably see why. JQuery gives you some helper functions that let you deal very nicely with event handling and element-selection.
To my surprise, Javascript actually is turning out to be a surprisingly powerful language. It apparently supports closures, and functions are first-order objects. The OOP system in Javascript is oddly different from other languages I've used, but it's workable. I'm doing some relatively funky stuff, and Javascript is handling it well enough. And everything I've done in JQuery so far works in IE6 and Firefox. That's a good sign.
In the course of all this, I'm also using PHP. I had to repress a PHP-induced shudder even as I write this. But this is my first venture into the realm of PHP5, and again it's turning out OK. They made a lot of changes between PHP4 and PHP5, many of which made a difference. The language is still far too verbose for my tastes; Ruby has spoiled me in terms of variable names without the need for Perl-style sigils. And the overload of array()'s in PHP still drives me batty. But this time, I'm making heavy use of some third-party libraries, e.g. Smarty templates for my interface, and Spyc to read some YAML for config and input files. It lets me do stuff in PHP without actually writing much code in PHP. Can't beat that.
Maybe that's the secret of life: to make up for deficiencies in languages I dislike by using tons of third-party libraries. Maybe. Well, no, probably not.
In other non-news, my Gentoo box should arrive at my door via UPS on Thursday. Sweet sweet salvation. I'm going to put this Vista laptop in the closet and bolt the door shut.
