The basic idea of Markdown is simple: To create a document, one writes plain text (bullet lists are lines that start with dashes, styles are written **bold** and *italics*, etc.). To display a document, the plain text is converted to HTML. That gives you the best of both worlds: the plain text is to write (much easier than HTML), store and transfer; the rendered HTML is nice to look at. It is amazing how popular Markdown has become: GitHub supports it for files such as readmes and gists; Stack Overflow uses it for comments; Lean Publishing supports no other format for submitting books; many blog engines let you write posts in it; etc.

Thanks to Rick Waldron, we have a detailed account of the decisions regarding ECMAScript.next that were made by TC39 [1] during its meeting from September 18-20, 2012. This blog post summarizes and explains the highlights.

2013-12-23: A new blog post on ParallelJS (as River Trail is now called) supersedes this post.

River Trail is a set of mechanisms that enable a new functional style of parallel programming in JavaScript. An initial prototype was developed by Intel. Recently, work has started to bring it to Firefox.

The Mac OS X shell has several Mac-only commands for communicating with the graphical user interface (GUI). They are useful in three cases: First, when switching back and forth between shell and GUI. Second, when interacting with the system from a language that is not Objective C or AppleScript: Bash, Node.js [1], Python etc.

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

Bracketing variable names with double underscores is a tradition in Python that JavaScript has borrowed a few times, most prominently for the property __proto__ [1] (which is currently non-standard, but will become part of ECMAScript 6). For Python, the following pronounciation has been suggested by Ned Batchelder:

[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.