When I tell non-programmers that what I do professionally involves JavaScript, I most commonly get the reaction: “Isn’t that that thing that you have to install and that makes the browser slow?”. This answer surprises me in two ways:

This blog post explores JavaScript’s eval function by implementing the foundation for an interactive command line. As a bonus, you’ll get to work with ECMAScript.next’s generators (which can already be tried out on current Firefox versions).

In the 1940s, the first computer programmers were all women. That only changed later. Quoting “Researcher reveals how ‘Computer Geeks’ replaced ‘Computer Girls’” by Brenda D. Frink for the Clayman Institute for Gender Research:

Update 2012-09-05: separated input and output.

Currently, you are forced to work with JavaScript code in either of two modes: You can either use a code editor and edit multiple lines or you can use an interactive command line and work with one line at a time (editing, evaluating). With jsrepl [GitHub project, live demo], I have prototyped a combination of both modes – no need to chose, any more.

In JavaScript, one has at most 53 bits for integers. This blog post explains how to work with large integers, by encoding them in strings.

James Burke’s npm module amdefine lets you write AMD modules [1] that also work on Node.js. To do so, you need to perform the following steps:

Several text messaging technologies impose character limits on messages. This blog post describes those limits and their advantages.

Servo is Mozilla’s next-generation web browser [1], with a focus on parallelism and security. It’s not much more than a technology demo and will remain so for a while, but it’s making progress nonetheless. Quoting Patrick Walton in a thread on Google Groups:

In this blog post, we give a name to JavaScript’s callback-based asynchronous programming style: continuation-passing style (CPS). We explain how CPS works and give tips for using it.

In general, arrays in JavaScript are sparse – they can have holes in them, because an array is simply a map from indices to values. This blog post explains how to create dense arrays, arrays without holes.