Michael Swierczek wrote:
1. The book title implies the book is oriented towards building applications. But the table of contents - asynchronous operations, functional programming, interfaces, lambdas, etc... looks like more than half is just dedicated to the Javascript language itself. I don't see that as bad, I'm just asking whether the book is really half learn Javascript and half learn how to make non-trivial Javascript applications.
2. Does the book walk through building one particular sample application as an example, or is it broken into a few sample applications? Or does it not work that way, and all of the sections have examples isolated from each other?
3. I'm just curious, given your expertise in Javascript, what you think of Typescript (Microsoft's open source superset of Javascript that includes type parameters and a class and module system), or the languages that compile into Javascript, like Dart, Coffeescript, or Clojurescript. Are you satisfied with working in raw Javascript, or do you have a favorite path forward that you believe would work best to make the language easier to use for complex applications?
4. When I'm reading someone's work, it helps me to understand their approach if I know what other areas of study and programming languages they know and like to use. (e.g. Larry Wall, creator of Perl, is a linguist. Martin Odersky, who created Scala, worked on the Java compiler at Sun and helped design Java generics. etc...) So... if you like, please inform us of your background and other languages you like to use, if any.
5. As mobile devices get more computing resources and browsers get more resource efficient, do you think we will ever reach the point when it really does make sense to write all mobile applications except heavily computational ones (photo editing, games with cutting edge graphics) in HTML5 + Javascript instead of native applications? Or in other words, do you think the concepts Mozilla is trying to promote with Firefox OS will ever take off, even if Firefox OS itself is dead in the water?
Michael Swierczek wrote:
At my day job I work primarily with Java, and I've been at that long enough that I'm strongly in "the grass is greener on the other side of the fence" mode. With that disclaimer out of the way, I think maybe the type system in Clojure or Perl6 might be good: you can specify the type parameters if you want, but the code usually runs fine without them (unless you've made a type-related error). It's an optional help.
My oldest kid is nine, and I'm trying to make writing software interesting for him but I can't get him much past "Hello World" before his mind wanders. It's a credit to you and probably to whoever raised you that were you playing with Basic by age 5.
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