sharkbrainguy

I think you've excluded the middle here, (#1.5 perhaps) one who thinks that your code is worthless/dangerous and does not call you a loser.

It can be true that a piece of software is a poor replacement for an existing tool.

It can be true that recommending it as a replacement for that tool is dangerous.

You can make these judgements about a piece of software without an incident like this happening. What's important here, is how you behave once you've made these judgements.

I don't think a critique of the code in question is especially relevant to the main point of the article, i.e. the practice of mocking open-source projects.

Debating the technical merits of this particular project can't really address that.

If you're after a standard library for Javascript, you could do worse than including es5-shim. Which has the advantage of being a library that (partially) implements a standard: Ecmascript 5.

    > es5-shim.js and es5-shim.min.js monkey-patch a
    > JavaScript context to contain all EcmaScript 5
    > methods that can be faithfully emulated with a
    > legacy JavaScript engine.

It provides Array::map, Array::filter, Array::reduce as defined in Ecmascript 5 along with String::trim and others, as well as replacing buggy implementations.

Previous versions of es5-shim included shims for things that cannot be correctly or completely shimmed in ES3 but those have since been separated and I now recommend including es5-shim in basically all web projects to get closer to a modern javascript in most browsers.

Clearly jQuery isn't providing a lot of the things they are looking for in a standard library, as it is focussed on DOM manipulation and Ruby.js attempts to provide core types like Enumerables and Time.

You can achieve the same effect without using eval, which his many known problems in terms of security and performance.

        function render(tpl,data){
            function lookup (obj, keys) {
                return (keys.length === 0) ? obj
                :  lookup(obj[keys[0]], keys.slice(1));
            }

            var matches = tpl.match(/\{[^\}]+\}/g),
                max = matches.length,
                i, rep, keys;

            for (i = 0; i < max; i++) {
                keys = matches[i].slice(1, -1).split('.');
                rep = lookup(data, keys);
                tpl = tpl.replace(matches[i],rep);
            }

            return tpl;
        }

        alert(render("{a} is all that i've {b.a} {b.b} {b.c}", {
            a: "this",
            b: {
                a: "ever",
                b: "really",
                c: "needed"
            } 
        }));

No, Javascript is not "just scheme" with a few bad design decisions. They have significant differences.

Scheme has:

  call-with-current-continuation http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_8.html#IDX509
  Tail Call Optimisation
  A numeric tower http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_8.html#SEC50
  A Code/Data equivalence and therefore macros
  Ports

Javascript has:

  Prototypal inheritance
  Every 'object' is mutable bag of string indexed properties

There's a pile of differences, even just at the semantic level before you get into the syntax or the equivalence semantics.

I understand that if you take a specific subset of javascript, you can write code as-though it has some scheme semantics (minus call/cc and TCO), but that's true to a similar extent of any language with lexical scope, closures and anonymous functions.

I have the same reaction,

because I prefer this:

    Q: "How much will lunch cost?"
    A: "$20"

To this:

    Q: "How much will lunch cost?"
    A: "Either $0 or $200"

I would also love an invite: @gmail.com

edit: Invite Received! Email redacted! Thanks alot

Here's javascript, the other languages are left as an exercise.

    function Kitten(width, height, color) {
        var img, g, w, h;

        w = parseInt(width,  10);
        h = parseInt(height, 10);
        g = color ? "" : "g/";
        img = document.createElement('img');
        img.src = "http://placekitten.com/" + g + w + "/" + h;
        img.width = w;
        img.height = h;

        return img;
    };