Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Javascript Problem" video.

  1. Fun fact: there is a book called “JavaScript: The Good Parts”. There is no book called “PHP: The Good Parts”.
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  2. 4:18 Those behaviours may be “surprising” and “counterintuitive”, but they are not “undefined”. They are defined in the language spec. Actually, a lot of the things in that list make perfect sense. For example, “NaN” may stand for “not a number”, but it is a valid floating-point value according to the IEEE-754 spec. Every modern computer implements floating point according to this spec, and every modern programming language likewise respects this behaviour in its floating-point type.
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  3. 8:04 If you are wondering what “LibreJS” is: https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/index.html
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  4. What he means is that Linux distros tend to integrate package managers that will automatically get the software and all its dependencies from known and trusted sources, rather than random websites.
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  5. 1:28 Please, do not do feature/behaviour selection based on user agents! Use more functional tests instead!
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  6. @Gonçalo Amaro I have used PHP, far more than I ever wished to. I have enough expertise in it to be able to make a living from it. For example, I wrote a WordPress plugin to extend the functionality of another WordPress plugin. So yes, that gives me a license to shit on it.
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  7. 3:19 Here’s another name for it: “compiled machine language”.
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  8. 7:36 But part of the terms of service for these sites to run code on my machine is that I get to inspect and reverse-engineer the code, and possibly hack it as well. If they don’t like that, they are free not to run code on my machine.
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  9. When I first looked at PHP, I got the impression that its designer was trying to copy Perl, but didn’t actually understand what they were copying. (Why “$” on the front of variable names, but not on anything else?) Nowadays, it looks like PHP is trying to copy Python. But again, they still don’t understand what they are copying. So for example they try to have iterators, but they are awkward to use compared to Python iterators.
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  10. Is winget really a package manager? https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/discussions/223
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  11. You couldn’t do YouTube-style commenting, where parts of the page refresh without the whole thing reloading, without AJAX. And you can’t do AJAX without some kind of browser-implemented scriptability. The standard right now is JavaScript. Even if you replace that with WebAssembly, what difference would that make, really?
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  12. No fundamental difference.
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  13. Machines, that is to say interpreters of machine language, can be built out of software as well as hardware.
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  14.  @Spartan322  A “machine language” is anything understood by an appropriate “machine”.
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  15.  @Spartan322  You’re not saying anything different from me. Particularly when you realize that “machine” doesn’t have to mean “hardware”.
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  16.  @Spartan322  On the contrary, such a unification is incredibly useful. As you go into later CS courses, you will discover this.
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  17.  @Caellyan  Why do non-CS people get so angry about this? It’s well-known that the distinction between “hardware” and “software” is pretty vague at the best of times -- if you insist on building a wall, think of concepts like “microcode” and “firmware” and where they fit in.
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  18. WordPress is not exactly known for its speed though, is it.
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