TL;DR: when using an object as a dictionary in TypeScript/ES6, iterate through it using `Object.keys()`. Coming from statically typed languages, I keep looking for a Map or Dict type in TypeScript (or JavaScript). People use objects for this, though. Objects have key-value pairs in them, and you can add them and delete them and declare …
Sometimes multiple pieces of the industry converge on an idea fromdifferent directions. This is a sign the idea is important. Yesterday I spoke at React Rally (video coming later) about theconfluence of React and Flux in the front end with functionalprogramming in the back end. Both embody principles of composition, declarativestyle, isolation, and unidirectional flow …
Read moreFunctional principles come together in GraphQL at React Rally
I never enjoyed front-end development, until I found Elm. JavaScript with its `undefined`, its untyped functions, its widely scoped mutable variables. It’s like Play-Doh, it’s so malleable. And when I try to make a sculpture, the arms fall off. It takes a lot of skill to make Play-Doh look good. Then Richard talked me into …
Read moreAn Opening Example of Elm: building HTML by parsing parameters
TL;DR – Clojure’s threading macro keeps code in a legible order, and it’s more extensible than methods. When we create methods in classes, we like that we’re grouping operations with related data. It’s a useful organizational scheme. There’s another reason to like methods: they put the code in an order that’s easy to read. In …
We used to write thick clients, fat happy Swing apps that executed application logic and business logic on the user’s computer, and connected to the server mostly for data access. Then we moved toward service-oriented architecture and the thin, browser-based client. This solved all our deployment problems, and it moved the business logic back to …
LinkedIn integration instructions provide the following syntax: http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js we say, WTF? what kind of script tag has a src attribute and content as well? It turns out that the JS in the src attribute is pulling those lines out of the DOM and parsing them. It is not really JS inside there, but a language …
How do you test whether a JavaScript object is empty?The short answer (if you’re using JQuery) is: $.isEmptyObject(obj) The longer answer is, you loop through its properties. This is the method JQuery is using. for(var prop in obj) { // it is not empty if this hits} The even longer answer is, you loop through …
Listening to Glenn Block talk about node.js at Technology and Friends, there’s something interesting about the philosophy behind node.js. Threads are hard. Threads include overhead, but more significantly, using them requires the developer to hold more stuff in his head. Node.js has a philosophy that leads to asynchronous processing without multiple threads. Glenn explains how …
This may be basic JavaScript:TGP, but I’m just getting the hang of it. I asked my JS peeps the other day, “If I have two functions and I they each need access to one internal function, how do I encapsulate that?” If I need to define one function that uses a nested function, all is …