Wow, it is another Javascript book. Contain yourself, I’ll tell you all about it in a moment. This is life in the intellectual fast lane. I thumbed through these books long ago and didn’t care for the language, but something recently has my curiosity up. For example, I did not know that shopping carts are programmed in Javascript. (Their functionality is elsewhere, but the client-side work is Javascript. That will be $100 please.)
Other than an unsuccessful foray to Panera this morning, I relaxed all day. The coffee shop was packed and they’ve removed the cash tin, where you could put in a buck-fifty and serve yourself (if all you wanted was a coffee). The wait for a chair was at least a half-hour, so I went to Starbucks. I admit it. Nothing to do Starbucks. Where it takes forever to get a coffee even if you are there alone. To make my morning, the new fancy kickstand on my bicycle is broken.Not as broken as that screwed up language, Javascript. Man, what an abortion of a concept that entire code turns out to be. Every command seems to have at least three exceptions, showing it has been tweaked and added to by every dork that came along. They appear too stupid to grasp that the language should operate the browser, not the other way around. I read the textbook and fully realized the author was not coming across with the goods. His examples needlessly complicate things and incorporate quirks that are buried deep in the text several pages back. No ice cream for that boy.
Plus, Javascript was the exciting part of my day. This can happen when you live in South Florida and have a brain. That isn’t clear, let me put it another way. In this state, the entire entertainment industry is built around people who don’t have the brains to entertain themselves. Such people must hire prostitutes, drink, gamble or confuse relaxation with goofing off because they lack the skills to do anything else.
I have to smile on that one, because I grew up around people who never pursued any long-term goals. How they would complain about being bored! How they laughed when I patiently did the two things allowed in our household (play piano and read encyclopedias after the old man passed out). When the weekends arrived, of course they had nothing to do. What the hell did they expect?
One item I should also point out is that most men never learned how to chase women at a young age either, while fully admitting there were no good instruction manuals available. As they get older, their desperation increases, never having learned to walk before they could run. I thought I would point that out. Well, okay, there were manuals, but they must have been written by MicroSoft. You know, 700 pages on how a bra works, but not one example on how to go about removing the stupid thing.
Allow me to sharpen the Javascript pencil. I wanted to learn how rollovers worked. These are those web pages with images that change when you roll your mouse over them, often changing back when you roll away. Here is a command that should take ten minutes to master, but they screwed it up so badly it took me three hours, which is a week in whiz kid hours. Don’t get me wrong, you can do it quickly by just following the examples; my goal was to understand the process. Now, I do understand it, and it stinks. Typical C+ scatterbrain drivel that passes as programming.
I’ve stumbled across dozens of operations not described in the manual, and folks, this is how viruses get started. Nasty people notice that sometimes things don’t go as planned. A good example is the command which opens web pages. It you type things just right, it will also open all kinds of other things. I was examining how a rollover worked even when the mouse moved to another window (as opposed to just out of the image onto another area of the same page). Nobody is always very careful where they park the cursor when they just want it out of the way. There you go; I’m saying it wouldn’t take much at all to design something you would subconciously try to move your cursor away from, thus issuing a (mouse out) command. The ActiveX blocker gets in the way, but we’ll get you to disable that, as well.
When I criticize these languages, remember that I have two (unused) programming degrees. I don’t mean to put anyone off. You are strongly encouraged to at least read over the same material. The interaction of the various languages is something not stressed enough in this age of specialization. Ask anyone who finally got a web page about how many “experts” they had to deal with along the way, each of whom truthfully claimed they could do the job for a suspiciously low price.
To emphasize my point, I myself have been fooled by such false claims. We’ve all encountered on-line forms. It is insane, but when you first learn to design these forms, the form does nothing. It just sits there. Nobody told you that you had to use html for the form, javascript to validate the info, CGI/Perl scripts to act on the data, msSQL to interpret your query and PHP to process the request. That is a minimum of five programming languages you would have to master just to do a simple data lookup. And trust me, all this is just the thin outer layer of the undertaking.
One last thing I can’t figure out. Nobody has ever improved the BASIC “for loop”. So why these goofs go about trying to get clever with their n++ crap is beyond me. Seem they all get too bored hanging around at Starbucks on weekends.
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