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.

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.