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Javascript Troubles

2022/01/09

Over the last month or two I've been spending time trying to learn javascript. It's pretty bad, however I found a really nice book with lots of good exercises which makes it more fun than expected. I never had much interest in web development and the complexities that come with it. I started programming in middle school with gamemaker 6. A good friend of mine introduced it to me and we spent many days those years making little games with each other.

gamemaker 6

New versions of the engine came out, but I started to broaden my interest. I spent some days learning C, but was about as terrible as you'd imagine for a 12/13 year old to be. In those days all the programming books at the library were for C++. It felt like the big professional language so that's what I started to use, but I never got too far. I make some tiny graphical programs and a few games, but for better or worse I wasn't good about data preservation and those tools died when I decided to wipe the harddrive and install Debian. I remember struggling to understand where the "exe"s were and filling up notebooks with every command I discovered. Slowly, I learned a tiny bit about shell scripting and then eventually python.

Over the next few years I used python and C primarily, but also messed around with Java a bit trying to make minecraft mods. At some point I switched from Debian to Arch, but tried out dozens of distros in between.

[image] arch linux screenshot

I used arch for a number of years and learned a good deal from it. Eventually, I decided to try out void on my laptop hearing it was simpler. I've always attempted to have a general understanding of how all the parts of my computer work together. I don't know or care if it's logical or practical; I love small elegant software. I learned about go which quickly replaced most other programming languages I'd been using.

void

Anyway, I looked at some job postings in town. They're pretty much all for web development. I don't really want to work in IT for the rest of my life. It certainly has been an improvement over retail, but I'd like to do something else. So, I've been learning javascript. The book I'm reading is called eloquent javasctipt and it's freely available online. The author is a great teacher and covers lots of strange quirks and edge cases. I also grabbed javascript: the good parts which is more of a language reference, but specifically gutting out many of the footguns and mistakes added to the language over the years.

eloquent javasctipt

javascript: the good parts

[image] Javascript: The Good Parts compared with a much larger language reference book