Craft & Artfulness

Let's face it, JavaScript by itself gives you enough freedom to write terribly bad code. It may not yet be the new Perl, but one can certainly go for the write-only style that still haunts one of the most useful programming languages in history. The recent ES generations (are we really finally about to call it ECMAScript?) gave my favorite language a huge productivity boost, and along came static type checkers, proper linters and decent style guides. But it's not all sunshine and unicorns shitting rainbows. The community seems to thirst for more and more syntactic sugar, yet at the same time needs more and more linter rules and type constraints to rein itself in... Perhaps at some point ES will stabilize and a new JavaScript (or whatever we will call it) may arise, discarding all the idiosyncrasies that we tried so hard to get rid of. But I don't have the patience to wait. And no matter what the community or business world says, I'm pretty sure we can discard some th

https://codepen.io/wshager/full/zWBzMV It says "directed acyclic word graph", which I think is the correct term, but I just found out on Wikipedia  that this is indeed a trie. The difference is illustrated quite precisely, but I think it's really the same thing. I didn't use an existing algorithm, but I just made this up myself. I didn't study computer science (and I'm mostly glad I didn't). If you did, let me know if it's any good.

Writing parsers is not for humans. Humans define grammars, and feed those to parsers. However, I was determined to try my hand at making a parser for XQuery in XQuery as a human, because I saw that the language is actually quite consistent. The same is true for XML and S-expressions, for example, and for those languages there already exist hand-built parsers (for example in in JavaScript, see https://github.com/isaacs/sax-js and https://github.com/fwg/s-expression respectively). After all, how hard can it be? Well pretty damn hard, as I've worked on it on and off for two years. Yet only recently I came up with three basic utility functions that help to understand how a parser actually works. These functions are variations of the widely known reduce  (or fold ) function. Looking ahead What you often need to do when parsing a string of text – character by character – is to look at what the next character is. For example, a colon has several different meanings in XQuery, so th

Programmeren is zowel een wetenschap als een gereedschap. De "man van de praktijk" loopt gaandeweg tegen problemen aan die formeel allang verkend zijn. Deze zaken zijn veelal uitgewerkt in ingewikkelde wetenschappelijke publicaties. Dat niet iedereen die leest is begrijpelijk, maar veel kennis is ook geïmplementeerd in functionele talen, als Haskell, Scala en recente LISP/ML varianten. Om inzicht te krijgen in fundamentele concepten is het verstandig om contact te houden met de ontwikkelingen in dergelijke talen. Ook in Javascript begint deze kennis door te dringen, al is dit geen zuivere functionele taal... Kennis van zuiver functioneel programmeren opdoen kan door zelf een taal te leren of door bronnen te raadplegen op het WWW, zoals diverse blogs en tutorials (er zijn ook veel videos) of hulp te vragen van experts op StackOverflow. Het doel is niet om zo'n taal te gebruiken, maar om concepten te doorgronden die eraan ten grondslag liggen. Dit geldt overigens ook voor