Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged programming, javascript

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Are traditional web frameworks and languages like RubyOnRail, Spring Boot and PHP dying now when new fast reactive pure JavaScript frameworks and services like Meteor, Node, Angular 2.0 and Firebase are breaking ground?

No.

[... 40 words]

How does one decide which Javascript framework (e.g. Node, Backbone, Angular) to use on any given project?

If you are just learning JavaScript, I suggest trying to work without any frameworks or libraries at all. Starting with something like Angular will make it much harder for you to learn the core language and browser APIs.

[... 137 words]

Should a beginner to web development start out with Node.Js?

Maybe. One of the things I like about Node.js is that the raw abstraction it provides over HTTP is much closer to how the actual protocol works than the abstractions provided many of the more widely used frameworks such as PHP, Django or Rails. That might actually make it an effective learning tool—I’d be interested in hearing from some web developers who learnt Node.js as their first server-side technology.

[... 87 words]

Is there any alternative to devbootcamp.com or hackreactor.com in Europe?

http://www.makersacademy.com/ are running a similar program in the Old Street area of London.

[... 30 words]

Wouldn’t an ASCII cellular automaton in javascript be the simplest starting point to teach/learn programming?

Absolutely not. The first step in learning to program is understanding that a computer can be quickly made to do something useful by executing lines of code. Personally I’m a big fan of firing up something with an interactive prompt (like Python, or even Firebug or the Google Chrome JS console) and demonstrating that typing a line of code hitting return will get a useful response.

[... 87 words]

Is there a method to programmatically clear browser cache in JavaScript?

No.

[... 18 words]

What companies are using Node.js in production in Texas?

There’s a list on this page: https://github.com/joyent/node/w...

[... 23 words]

Why do so few companies use the Dojo Toolkit?

Dojo is fantastic software, but it does a lot more than the other libraries and consequently has a much higher learning curve. It’s advanced features may serve as something of a disadvantage for achieving more widespread adoption—most developers don’t need the more advanced abstractions provided by Dojo when they start their projects, and by the time they DO need that stuff they’ve already written a ton of code using another library!

[... 88 words]

grammar.coffee (via) The annotated grammar for CoffeeScript, a new language that compiles to JavaScript developed by DocumentCloud’s Jeremy Ashkenas. The linked page is generated using Jeremy’s Docco tool for literate programming, also written in CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript itself is implemented in CoffeeScript, using a bootstrap compiler originally written in Ruby. # 8th March 2010, 7:27 pm