So here we are

I never thought I'd be doing this, but it's become apparent that blogs about computer programming are extremely useful, not to mention ultra-hip and will have the chicks at Starbucks flocking over to my non-hip, non-Mac laptop to see what I'm writing about. I'm just kidding, the chicks would have to flock to Dunkin Donuts to find me. It looks like I still need to work on the color scheme and shrink the column width down so that about three words will fit into each line, though. Then I'll feel smarter.

I started writing a vi-clone in Javascript yesterday. It's still in its infancy, but the cursor controls and insert and command mode work, so it's just a matter of adding commands to make it complete. The difficult part was realizing that no amount of trying would make a <textarea> behave like I wanted it to, so I had to use a <div> and implement a line editor from scratch.

Javascript is quickly becoming one of my favorite languages, although it still has its quirks. It's extremely flexible, and has first class functions, which are making their way up the list of mandatory features for me.

The most glaring problem that Javascript has is its annoying treatment of "this." I'm especially peeved that you can't attach a method of an object to an event handler using addEventListener. Yes, there are ways around this, but this should be easy. Right now, it makes it difficult to encapsulate everything in objects, so you always run the risk of name collisions by using global function names.

Of course, you could add a prefix to everything, like vieditor_keypressed(ev){}, but this is 2007, and the namespace problem has been solved for years.

Anyway, that's a small complaint. I think Javascript gets a bad name mostly because of all of the browser incompatibilities, but it's minimal work to write a decent layer to hide those.