[This post is part of a series on the special property __proto__]

This blog post looks at the special property __proto__, which allows you to get and set the prototype of an object. In order to understand this post, you should be familiar with JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance [1].

Quoting Wikipedia:

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output.

@cowboy (Ben Alman) gives the following example for JavaScript:

    !function $(){console.log('!'+$+'()')}()

Why does the quine work? The above code uses several tricks.

Today, I’ve asked on Twitter:

JavaScript: single quotes versus double quotes. Any preferences?

And I got great answers. Two funny examples:

Update 2012-09-21: New in Sect. 4: using void for IIFEs, concatenating IIFEs.

This blog post looks at a syntactic distinction that is unfortunately quite important in JavaScript: the difference between expressions and statements.

This blog post takes a look at the empty regular expression.

JavaScript is widely used these days. But there are still many people who dislike it, which is why Dart and – to a lesser degree – CoffeeScript have passionate fans. Recently, Crockford, who has done much to establish JavaScript as a credible general-purpose programming language, called it “tragically important”. In this blog post, I argue that we should see JavaScript’s glass (cup?) as half full and not as half empty.

The “Zen of Python” is a mini style guide for Python code that is also interesting if you don’t program Python. Its abstract reads:

Long time Pythoneer Tim Peters succinctly channels the BDFL's [Benevolent Dictator For Life, a nickname of Python creator Guido van Rossum] guiding principles for Python's design into 20 aphorisms, only 19 of which have been written down.

Question: What object is not an instance of Object? Or, put differently: What value v makes the following three expressions true?

    typeof v === "object"
    v !== null
    !(v instanceof Object)

2012-08-24: JSReload now also supports Chrome/Mac.

This blog post explains how to use Node.js to reload a tab in Safari whenever a file changes. Alas, this solution only works on a Mac, because it relies on AppleScript to remotely control Safari. You can download it as project JSReload on GitHub.