Sure, but in how many languages do you iterate the members of an object and seriously expect it to return anything like array.length? It seems to me that for...in returns exactly what I expect it to return, whether I'm using prototype or not -- the members of the array object that I'm iterating, not the elements of the array. That's not to say for...in is not useful, rather, that you just can't expect cokes to come out of a candy machine.
You missed the point, which is simply that sticking to a paradigm merely because you're invested in it is not always smart.
I have looked a little more closely at ATLAS
I'm not defending ATLAS.
they broke some fundamental parts of the language
I think that's hogwash. Javascript didn't include the prototype property because they liked the way it sounded -- it's meant to be used to extend existing objects. The only instances in which this should break people's code is a) property name collisions, since js has no namespace support, or b) badly written code, like counting array elements by iterating with for instead of doing array.length. In the case of the former, this is a shortcoming of the *language.* As for the latter, well, enough said.
But again, you make it sound like I'm trying to convince you to use it. Frankly, I couldn't care less. Just don't tell me it's worthless, because I get a great deal of mileage out of it, and so do plenty of other serious developers.
Even though the JS files may be cached they still have to be parsed when they are included so you still have memory and processor overhead to deal with.
This makes me think of those guys that are still bitching about the performance hit from putting bevels and drop shadows on OS icons. Really, we're not talking about paring two more bytes off a boot loader for a 6802.
Suit yourself. I've been doing non-trivial js since about 1997, and I do indeed have a codebase, but look: five years ago all my server-side processing was in Perl. Now, the vast majority of it is in PHP. Roll with the times. If I really thought my personal codebase was that valuable, I'd still be stuck in BASIC.
As for prototype being great for people just jumping onto the AJAX bandwagon, if you think that, you really have not taken a good look at it. The AJAX bits are a small part of the whole -- most of it is devoted to javascript programmers, pure and simple. I'm not talking about widgets or effects, but data structures and methods for accessing them.
But if you don't want to use it, nobody is going to force you to do so. But please, don't assume your intransigence is indicative of some flaw in the framework. Or do... I'm going to use it anyway.
You're going to get 'J is 5' back. To me, this is something that's part of the language primitives.
I presume that's a typo. You get 35 back.
As for it being part of the language primitives, Javascript doesn't have an array primitive. It's just an object, and when you do for(i in t) you're iterating the properties of an object. The "incorrect" result could occur regardless of whether you use prototype -- all you have to do is add a property to the Array object. If you're trying to count array elements, Javascript provides array.length. This is why.
The inclusion issue is valid -- Dojo does indeed do it better (though it kinda has to be, since the whole tamale is over a megabyte). But I'm *not* talking about adding 53k to a 6k page. I'm talking about adding 53k to a website. Again, once it's cached, there's no hit.
Fair enough. I think your ire is best aimed at people who are just plain sloppy and don't think about what they are doing. Folks like that are a problem regardless of how great the tools are...
That said, I can't speak to the Digg example, but I have seen plenty of large sites where it is worth it in terms of developer time to dump everything you might need everywhere rather than crafting the right set of functions for each page. I work for a university, and there's undoubtedly a lot of unused code on our site, but then, if the tiny staff here aimed for maximum code efficiency over the thousands of pages we're responsible for, we'd never get anything done.
ADDENDUM: Actually, I just went over and looked at Digg, and I'd have to say the big crime they've committed is to have so *many* files devoted to like one tiny little function. The aboutdigg.js file you mention is a measly 183 characters. Hell, the HTTP overhead is probably bigger than that.
In my experience, prototype and Dojo are both very stable at this point, far more stable than would be any comparable library of my own making, as I don't have a team of developers or a large body of users available to test it for me. You think there's a thousand and one edgecase bugs in prototype? How many are in your personal library? I'd far rather rely on something that has been seen and used by a thousand people than something that's been seen and used by one.
As for the usefulness of these toolkits, weighing in at 53k (considerably less if you were to use any of the js compacting methods available out there), I find prototype to be an enormous time-saver, and the code saved in my applications goes a great distance toward offsetting the one-time 53k download for users of my websites.
Look, if I took your logic, the next time I wrote an OS X app, I'd write it from scratch in C, without the benefit of the Mac frameworks, and cut and paste from "my own personal library." And I'd probably want to compile it by hand too -- God knows what kind of code the compiler is actually generating, right?
There is a tremendous advantage to abstraction and generalization -- indeed, we'd still be coding ones and zeros if we didn't have it. Sure, you can take it too far too fast, but as one who has done a lot of coding with javascript since not long after its inception, I can tell you that unless you're not doing anything much more complicated than rollovers, it's time to move up. Whether you want to do that with community code or your personal collection is up to you, but I'd like to have a little free time at the end of the day.
It won't be long before a) all Macs come with Windows and OSX installed, and b) Windows will no longer be called Windows, it will be called "Game Mode."
I'm kidding, of course, at least partly, but I suspect that if Mac ports decline, it's definitely what Mac users will use Windows for. Hell, I do already, just in a separate machine. Kind of a funny end considering how long Apples have been decried as "toys."
Point of fact: self-checkout systems are some of the worst designed user interfaces on earth. I'm 36, a software developer, and a gadget freak. It's fair to say that I'm very familiar with UI concepts of many sorts. But these things can throw me for a loop. They look like they were designed by Dr. Frankenstein -- bill changer from this machine, card reader from that. What a mess. You put your cash in one place and your change comes out somewhere eight feet away, while your receipt comes out somewhere else. And the worst bit is that you can't take anything off the bagging counter without making the machine go into hysterics.
I once got $40 cash back from a debit card purchase. My cash came out so far from where the actual business was going on that I forgot all about it until twenty minutes later. Butterfly ballots indeed. This is far worse.
I have absolutely no problems letting people, who will not help themselves, starve. None whatsoever.
And you're happy paying a far larger price for the police protection and incarceration that will follow?
Having just checked the budget for just *one* of the years in my state, I found the welfare section was *5 billion* dollars. For one year!
a) Link, please. b) This is a totally meaningless figure in the absence of such context as the total budget, the spending priorities within this figure, federal funding, etc.
Look, your argument boils down to this: I saw some waste when I worked for the government. Well, I have a counter-argument for that: I work for the government, and I've seen a lot of money well spent. Game over. We're at an impasse. I've asked you for facts like four times and you've given me a handful of decontextualized, unsubstantiated numbers and a couple anectdotes. It seems to me that a) you've got a chip on your shoulder because you don't like subsidizing the peaceful society from which you benefit hugely, and b) you don't really have a clue what you're talking about.
One thing is for certain: this conversation is a waste of my time. Farewell.
Point of fact -- the Apple Geniuses marketing campaign is not focused on merely repairing Macs. They aim to help you maximize your creative potential by showing you the ins and outs of some fairly heavy duty software (e.g. photoshop, modo, final cut, etc.).
Not that I think they are geniuses, really, but there you go.
2 years on "welfare" then you are cut off. Find a job or starve.
So you have no problem with allowing people to starve? Ok. I think that I don't even need to make an argument. But I will point out that there are no indefinite welfare programs anyway. Did you miss welfare reform in the 90s?
You've got 2 years, hell the gov't will even help with education and job placement (at least the state gov't where I live does)
Will government funded education and job placement miraculously be more efficient than welfare? I mean, you're lumping all assistance programs into "welfare" to begin with, how do these two items not constitute welfare as well?
But those that only wish to be a leach, or have no self respect regarding their place in this world, have abused the system, and turned it into a generational life support.
People abuse all sorts of things, but we don't respond by trashing them. That notion is encapsulated in the cliche "throwing out the baby with the bathwater." Unless you can provide me with serious evidence (i.e. something more substantial than "I saw it") that a significant percentage of welfare recipients abuse the programs, I will have to conclude that there's nothing more to be said here.
I'm not certain, but I think what you just did is an appeal to authority. Not sure how it works when the authority is the person making the argument, but whatever.
Putting that aside, how do you propose improving welfare, or are you suggesting that money would be better spent on weapons systems and that the poor should be left to sink or swim?
Were you just posting the Daily Kos talking points without thinking?
Point of fact, Kos is primarily a political tactician and not prone to making unbased assertions. These are not points he would make.
OTOH, which social programs are "craptastic," pray tell? As for our government protecting us from terrorists, I hardly see how this ridiculous boondoggle has anything to do with that, any more than the Crusader artillery piece or the new class of destroyers are meant to fight terrorism.
Next time you get a chance to remove your head from your ass, you might take note that the informed criticism of "our" president (he's not the president of Slashdot) is based on substantive policy concerns and has nothing to do with blind hatred or winning at all costs. What you are suggesting is really nothing more than projection, and it is the sort of reaction to criticism that is absolutely guaranteed to prevent any cohesive bipartsanship in our lifetimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but in how many languages do you iterate the members of an object and seriously expect it to return anything like array.length? It seems to me that for...in returns exactly what I expect it to return, whether I'm using prototype or not -- the members of the array object that I'm iterating, not the elements of the array. That's not to say for...in is not useful, rather, that you just can't expect cokes to come out of a candy machine.
That's a different story...
You missed the point, which is simply that sticking to a paradigm merely because you're invested in it is not always smart.
I have looked a little more closely at ATLAS
I'm not defending ATLAS.
they broke some fundamental parts of the language
I think that's hogwash. Javascript didn't include the prototype property because they liked the way it sounded -- it's meant to be used to extend existing objects. The only instances in which this should break people's code is a) property name collisions, since js has no namespace support, or b) badly written code, like counting array elements by iterating with for instead of doing array.length. In the case of the former, this is a shortcoming of the *language.* As for the latter, well, enough said.
But again, you make it sound like I'm trying to convince you to use it. Frankly, I couldn't care less. Just don't tell me it's worthless, because I get a great deal of mileage out of it, and so do plenty of other serious developers.
Even though the JS files may be cached they still have to be parsed when they are included so you still have memory and processor overhead to deal with.
This makes me think of those guys that are still bitching about the performance hit from putting bevels and drop shadows on OS icons. Really, we're not talking about paring two more bytes off a boot loader for a 6802.Suit yourself. I've been doing non-trivial js since about 1997, and I do indeed have a codebase, but look: five years ago all my server-side processing was in Perl. Now, the vast majority of it is in PHP. Roll with the times. If I really thought my personal codebase was that valuable, I'd still be stuck in BASIC.
As for prototype being great for people just jumping onto the AJAX bandwagon, if you think that, you really have not taken a good look at it. The AJAX bits are a small part of the whole -- most of it is devoted to javascript programmers, pure and simple. I'm not talking about widgets or effects, but data structures and methods for accessing them.
But if you don't want to use it, nobody is going to force you to do so. But please, don't assume your intransigence is indicative of some flaw in the framework. Or do... I'm going to use it anyway.
Try this in a page with prototype included:
... various code...
You're going to get 'J is 5' back. To me, this is something that's part of the language primitives.
I presume that's a typo. You get 35 back.
As for it being part of the language primitives, Javascript doesn't have an array primitive. It's just an object, and when you do for(i in t) you're iterating the properties of an object. The "incorrect" result could occur regardless of whether you use prototype -- all you have to do is add a property to the Array object. If you're trying to count array elements, Javascript provides array.length. This is why.
The inclusion issue is valid -- Dojo does indeed do it better (though it kinda has to be, since the whole tamale is over a megabyte). But I'm *not* talking about adding 53k to a 6k page. I'm talking about adding 53k to a website. Again, once it's cached, there's no hit.
Fair enough. I think your ire is best aimed at people who are just plain sloppy and don't think about what they are doing. Folks like that are a problem regardless of how great the tools are...
That said, I can't speak to the Digg example, but I have seen plenty of large sites where it is worth it in terms of developer time to dump everything you might need everywhere rather than crafting the right set of functions for each page. I work for a university, and there's undoubtedly a lot of unused code on our site, but then, if the tiny staff here aimed for maximum code efficiency over the thousands of pages we're responsible for, we'd never get anything done.
ADDENDUM: Actually, I just went over and looked at Digg, and I'd have to say the big crime they've committed is to have so *many* files devoted to like one tiny little function. The aboutdigg.js file you mention is a measly 183 characters. Hell, the HTTP overhead is probably bigger than that.
In my experience, prototype and Dojo are both very stable at this point, far more stable than would be any comparable library of my own making, as I don't have a team of developers or a large body of users available to test it for me. You think there's a thousand and one edgecase bugs in prototype? How many are in your personal library? I'd far rather rely on something that has been seen and used by a thousand people than something that's been seen and used by one.
As for the usefulness of these toolkits, weighing in at 53k (considerably less if you were to use any of the js compacting methods available out there), I find prototype to be an enormous time-saver, and the code saved in my applications goes a great distance toward offsetting the one-time 53k download for users of my websites.
Look, if I took your logic, the next time I wrote an OS X app, I'd write it from scratch in C, without the benefit of the Mac frameworks, and cut and paste from "my own personal library." And I'd probably want to compile it by hand too -- God knows what kind of code the compiler is actually generating, right?
There is a tremendous advantage to abstraction and generalization -- indeed, we'd still be coding ones and zeros if we didn't have it. Sure, you can take it too far too fast, but as one who has done a lot of coding with javascript since not long after its inception, I can tell you that unless you're not doing anything much more complicated than rollovers, it's time to move up. Whether you want to do that with community code or your personal collection is up to you, but I'd like to have a little free time at the end of the day.
It won't be long before a) all Macs come with Windows and OSX installed, and b) Windows will no longer be called Windows, it will be called "Game Mode."
I'm kidding, of course, at least partly, but I suspect that if Mac ports decline, it's definitely what Mac users will use Windows for. Hell, I do already, just in a separate machine. Kind of a funny end considering how long Apples have been decried as "toys."
That's the truth. If these places want me to check out my own purchases, they damn well better cut me a paycheck while they're at it.
Point of fact: self-checkout systems are some of the worst designed user interfaces on earth. I'm 36, a software developer, and a gadget freak. It's fair to say that I'm very familiar with UI concepts of many sorts. But these things can throw me for a loop. They look like they were designed by Dr. Frankenstein -- bill changer from this machine, card reader from that. What a mess. You put your cash in one place and your change comes out somewhere eight feet away, while your receipt comes out somewhere else. And the worst bit is that you can't take anything off the bagging counter without making the machine go into hysterics.
I once got $40 cash back from a debit card purchase. My cash came out so far from where the actual business was going on that I forgot all about it until twenty minutes later. Butterfly ballots indeed. This is far worse.
Yeah, I avoid installing a browser for similar reasons. If I need to see a webpage, I can damn well march down to the library and print one out!
"ABC wants DVRs to act just like regular TV"
I have absolutely no problems letting people, who will not help themselves, starve. None whatsoever.
And you're happy paying a far larger price for the police protection and incarceration that will follow?
Having just checked the budget for just *one* of the years in my state, I found the welfare section was *5 billion* dollars. For one year!
a) Link, please. b) This is a totally meaningless figure in the absence of such context as the total budget, the spending priorities within this figure, federal funding, etc.
Look, your argument boils down to this: I saw some waste when I worked for the government. Well, I have a counter-argument for that: I work for the government, and I've seen a lot of money well spent. Game over. We're at an impasse. I've asked you for facts like four times and you've given me a handful of decontextualized, unsubstantiated numbers and a couple anectdotes. It seems to me that a) you've got a chip on your shoulder because you don't like subsidizing the peaceful society from which you benefit hugely, and b) you don't really have a clue what you're talking about.
One thing is for certain: this conversation is a waste of my time. Farewell.
If you think entrepreneurs have not been spinning crap, you haven't been paying attention the last ten years.
Point of fact -- the Apple Geniuses marketing campaign is not focused on merely repairing Macs. They aim to help you maximize your creative potential by showing you the ins and outs of some fairly heavy duty software (e.g. photoshop, modo, final cut, etc.).
Not that I think they are geniuses, really, but there you go.
They may be successful, but they're still crap.
Geek Squad time breakdown:
Examining zits - 33%
Popping zits - 38%
Comparing zits - 24%
Recommending customer replace computer with overpriced Bestbuy crap - 5%
2 years on "welfare" then you are cut off. Find a job or starve.
So you have no problem with allowing people to starve? Ok. I think that I don't even need to make an argument. But I will point out that there are no indefinite welfare programs anyway. Did you miss welfare reform in the 90s?
You've got 2 years, hell the gov't will even help with education and job placement (at least the state gov't where I live does)
Will government funded education and job placement miraculously be more efficient than welfare? I mean, you're lumping all assistance programs into "welfare" to begin with, how do these two items not constitute welfare as well?
But those that only wish to be a leach, or have no self respect regarding their place in this world, have abused the system, and turned it into a generational life support.
People abuse all sorts of things, but we don't respond by trashing them. That notion is encapsulated in the cliche "throwing out the baby with the bathwater." Unless you can provide me with serious evidence (i.e. something more substantial than "I saw it") that a significant percentage of welfare recipients abuse the programs, I will have to conclude that there's nothing more to be said here.
I'm not certain, but I think what you just did is an appeal to authority. Not sure how it works when the authority is the person making the argument, but whatever.
Putting that aside, how do you propose improving welfare, or are you suggesting that money would be better spent on weapons systems and that the poor should be left to sink or swim?
It's easy to criticize something you don't directly benefit from, isn't it?
Yes, I can't wait until shape-shifting jet airliners make it into the civilian sector.
Were you just posting the Daily Kos talking points without thinking?
Point of fact, Kos is primarily a political tactician and not prone to making unbased assertions. These are not points he would make.
OTOH, which social programs are "craptastic," pray tell? As for our government protecting us from terrorists, I hardly see how this ridiculous boondoggle has anything to do with that, any more than the Crusader artillery piece or the new class of destroyers are meant to fight terrorism.
Next time you get a chance to remove your head from your ass, you might take note that the informed criticism of "our" president (he's not the president of Slashdot) is based on substantive policy concerns and has nothing to do with blind hatred or winning at all costs. What you are suggesting is really nothing more than projection, and it is the sort of reaction to criticism that is absolutely guaranteed to prevent any cohesive bipartsanship in our lifetimes.
I think you may be reading a bit too much into my comments. I'm merely trying to point out that technology doesn't automatically lift all boats.
It was not luck, however, that lead to the civilized society.
No, that's not luck. It's exploitation.What, did you research where and to whom you wanted to be born?