When I started to learn JavaScript about eight years ago, a bizarre situation for me was the existence of both undefined and null that represent empty values. What is the clear difference between them? They both seem to define empty values, and moreover the comparison null == undefined evaluates to true. Most of the modern languages like Ruby, Python or Java have a single null value… Continue reading
Open source changed the software development. And it changes the developers. Many libraries, apps, servers, and much more are powered by open source software. Catch the open source wave I always wanted to create and maintain an open source project. It is a must experience for every software developer. This way I started to work on a JavaScript library called Voca. It's main scope is… Continue reading
The software development complexity is increasing day by day. Almost every year a new framework (like AngularJS, ReactJS) is released, new build tool (like Webpack, Rollup). Even new JavaScript versions (ECMAScript 2015, 2016 and soon 2017) are released every year! Generally the same situation exists in other fields of software development. For example mobile applications. 2 years ago Apple introduced a new programming language Swift.… Continue reading
This story starts with a confession: I was afraid of Unicode for a long time. When a programming task required Unicode knowledge, I was searching for a hackable solution for the problem, without detailed sense what I was doing. My avoiding continued until I faced a problem that required detailed Unicode knowledge. There was no way to apply situational solutions. After applying some efforts, reading… Continue reading
The complexity of software applications is growing. The code quality is important in order to make the application stable and easily extensible. Unfortunately almost every developer, including myself, in his career faced with bad quality code. And it's a swamp. Such code has the following harmful characteristics: Functions are too long and do too many things Often functions have side effects that are difficult to… Continue reading
I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance [...]. Clean code does one thing well. Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ In the same period of ECMAScript 2016 release in June 2016, JavaScript developers are happy to know that another bunch of awesome proposals reached the stage… Continue reading
Many developers were frustrated about JavaScript, especially before ECMAScript 2015 standard. And they had the right too: the language is known for its weakness and initial design drawbacks. How did it happen? At the beginning of the web era, no one did know how exactly the web will look in 10 - 15 years. And especially that a small Java's brother JavaScript will become the… Continue reading
It's known that before ECMAScript 2015 JavaScript language was tricky. For simple scripts ES5 code works fine. But as soon as the application complexity grows, you start to feel that the lack of language constructs is making your code unpleasant. Because you have to implement the application requirements, you can't jump over the parts of code that are troublesome to implement in ES5 style. The… Continue reading
Symbol is a new primitive type available from ECMAScript 2015, which allow to create unique identifiers let uniqueKey = Symbol('SymbolName'). You may use symbols as keys of properties in objects. A list of symbols that JavaScript treats specially is published as well-known symbols. Well-known symbols are used by built-in JavaScript algorithms. For example Symbol.iterator is utilized to iterate over items in arrays, strings, or… Continue reading
Hoisting is the process of virtually moving the variable or function definition to the beginning of the scope, usually for variable statement var and function declaration function fun() {...}. When let (and also const and class, which have similar declaration behavior as let) declarations were introduced by ES2015, many developers including myself were using the hoisting definition to describe how variables are accessed. But after more… Continue reading