After noticing that many employers listed “javascript” among the required scripting tools they were looking for I thought “Self, why don’t you know any javascript?”
Answering this question goes back to my early days of making webpages. My first website was made on angelfire.com in 1998. It had some very cheesy elements, those horrible tiled backgrounds that came with every angelfire site, I used the marquee tag and put images in it, and tables confused me. At one point a section of my site was made out of FRAMES! Oh the horrors of those early websites. But I was determined to learn more, so during the summer of 1999 when I first travelled to Philadelphia to watch my cousin for the summer I wanted to spend some time learning more web stuff, like javascript.
I printed out tons of stuff that summer, HTML Guides, mIRC help file (for mirc scripting back when R2D2 was an mIRC bot), and this big huge javascript tutorial. I got most of my objectives that summer completed, but javascript hounded me.
The trouble was compatibility. Javascript is happy with Netscape, and does stupid things or nothing on older versions of IE. Then IE had it’s own “JScript” which was quite similar to javascript, but didn’t work in Netscape. Grr. After wading through a few pages about javascript frames and layers, trying them out and realizing that I had to write twice as much code to get things working properly with Netscape AND IE, I gave up. I threw all these javascript tutorals into a folder and forgot about them, because JAVASCRIPT IS CRAP.
Fast forward 4 years. PHP has taken the place of a lot of stuff that javascript used to commonly handle. I push away silly stuff like layering and evil frames, Who needs javascript? Javascript is so last Millennium!
Then it’s 2004 and I’m working at a web development company, I keep coming across bits of javascript in their code. It’s just simple stuff to detect browsers where php is not enabled, or making pretty image buttons that have mouseover effects, or making certain size popup windows. It was all simple stuff, but I harbored my hatred for javascript, so I didn’t pay much attention to it, just copied what I needed to copy and hacked my way through those bits.
So now I’m looking for a job, and they want javascript. FINE! So I sat down with a javascript tutorial today.
Wow. Javascaript is easy.
After all this work I’ve done with perl and php in the past couple years javascript isn’t looking nearly as scary. So after just a day devoted to exploring common, modern javascript I feel confident that I have a good handle on it, at least enough to survive using it on any sort of site. Yay!
I mentioned this adventure in javascript to a friend of mine and he concurred that there was a crazy javascript/jscript/vbscript bundle of evil back in the day that turned a lot of people off to any sort of <script>. Interested in this conflict I came upon this article, which is a very interesting article about javascript, including *why* it’s called JAVAscript:
All right, let’s hear it for marketing!
I installed xfce4 on my laptop today, it worked on my first try starting it, and it runs pretty well. Then I thought “ooh I should take a screenshot.” But then I realized that I don’t have any screenshot software installed, and firefox won’t be done compiling for another 7 years or so, so I pulled out my camera.
And since I can’t take out my camera without taking pictures of my kitten:
Caligula sleeping during the day so he has enough energy to jump on my head tonight while I’m trying to sleep.
