You know you’ve been courting functional programming too long…
…when even your JavaScript code starts looking like this: function applyTextProcessors(xmlFragment, textProcessors) { return textProcessors.length == 0 ? xmlFragment : applyTextProcessors(...
View ArticleMemoize in JavaScript
In JavaScript, functions are objects. No big deal, until you expand that to functions can have state, and realize that things like this become possible: function fact(n) { var memo =...
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XTech
I am amiss in not mentioning XTech sooner. In a few days, I’ll be there to speak about XMPP, enabling real-time and user-to-user communication in the browser, and how that changes the rules. Last year...
View ArticleSamePlace spinoffs #1: CSS Query
Before: var xulScriptlet; var blueprint = document.getElementById('blueprints').firstChild; while(blueprint) { if(blueprint.getAttribute('class') == 'scriptlet') break; blueprint =...
View ArticlePut the Fox in the Box
More goodies for MozRepl-equipped Firefoxes: T. V. Raman points me to a simple shell script to start and drive the browser on headless machines and to a module to drive Firefox from Emacspeak. Quote of...
View ArticleSynchronous invocation in JavaScript, part 1: problem and basic solution
(Update: a library based on this series is in use in SamePlace and is available here.) Here’s something most languages can do which JavaScript can’t (at least when hosted in the browser): print("Going...
View ArticleSynchronous invocation in JavaScript, part 2: execution dissected
Let’s review the process definition and process constructor from part 1: 1 function proc(processDef) { 2 var process = processDef(); 3 4 function driver() { 5 var pseudoBlockingCall = process.next(); 6...
View ArticleSynchronous invocation in JavaScript, part 3: returning values
We’ve seen how to simulate a blocking sleep() in JavaScript and what happens under the hood when we do. Another scenario where a blocking call makes a big difference in terms of clarity is requesting...
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Synchronous invocation in JavaScript, part 4: error handling
Last time we saw how to transfer results of computations from pseudo-blocking calls back into the main process. What happens if when something goes wrong, though? In the (real) synchronous world, error...
View Articleseethrough, a simple XML/XHTML templating system for… JavaScript, this
Still following the philosophy of “what the hell are you still doing on my disk”, I released seethrough for JavaScript, a port of the XML/XHTML template engine I wrote for Erlang some time ago. It’s...
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