Elegant Programming

Here’s a new book on writing elegant JavaScript:

Take a look at the Google Web Toolkit Product Overview. It’s a cool new open-source development kit that allows you to more easily create cross-browser AJAX applications. You develop in Java, so that you can debug and test using your favorite tools like Eclipse and Junit, and when ready, it generates HTML and highly-optimized JavaScript code for you to deploy.

I normally avoid Slashdot, having overdosed on it around 2001/2002. But today there’s an article titled “What makes a programming language successful” that is truly a great read (using my normal setting of threshold=4 or 5). My favorite quote? “Comparing [Perl] to Basic is like comparing a pineapple to a raisin.” As an added bonus, I learned what “duck typing” is all about. Oh yeah…the original article, “13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die… of old age” is pretty good too.