https://www.howarddierking.com/tags/javascript/ Recent content in Javascript on howarddierking.com Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.howarddierking.com/2022/06/13/right-tool-right-idiom/ Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.howarddierking.com/2022/06/13/right-tool-right-idiom/ Jeff Atwood, the co-founder of Stack Overflow and developer who famously said “Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript” wrote a post back in 2005 entitled “You Can Write FORTRAN in any Language”. At the time, Microsoft’s .NET framework was relatively new, and there were lots of heated discussions around a new programming language, C# and what it meant that so many Visual Basic programmers were dropping VB with prejudice in favor of it. https://www.howarddierking.com/2018/11/20/rdf-inferencing-in-action/ Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.howarddierking.com/2018/11/20/rdf-inferencing-in-action/ If you’ve been around me for any period of time, you’ve probably heard me say that I find two common approaches to software development: the mathematician’s approach and the linguist’s approach. The mathematician views the software design process as an equation to balance and typically does incredibly well at problems relating to algorithms, analysis, and lower-level system domains. The linguist, on the other hand, views the process of creating software as an exposition - a way of communicating an abstract idea via a constrained medium such as a programming language. https://www.howarddierking.com/2018/08/20/functional-javascript-playground/ Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.howarddierking.com/2018/08/20/functional-javascript-playground/ I’m a big believer that functional programming may be the only way to write reliable Javascript code and stay sane. However, I also want to acknowledge the reality that functional programming in general can be intimidating to developers who are relatively new to it (and/or who may have nightmares of lisp programming from a survey of languages course at university); and it can be hard to do well in a language like Javascript, since the language supports first class functional constructs along with … well … pretty much every other language construct ever conceived. https://www.howarddierking.com/2016/11/17/some-functional-javascript-goodness/ Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.howarddierking.com/2016/11/17/some-functional-javascript-goodness/ One of my pet projects is an international postal address formatter library. I built this for one of my teams as they have this as a requirement and there was nothing already on NPM - so now there is. In the process, I got to stretch myself in my functional programming skills using Ramda, and I wanted to show you a [I think] cool example. 'use strict'; let cf = require('. https://www.howarddierking.com/2014/07/01/managing-a-database-connection-in-an-expressjs-application/ Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.howarddierking.com/2014/07/01/managing-a-database-connection-in-an-expressjs-application/ A Web API or Web application backed by a database of some sort is a pretty typical application architecture regardless of what language or platform we might be looking at. So you can imagine my surprise that I haven’t really ever been able to find a satisfactory answer for how to best accomplish this kind of thing for an Express application that uses MongoDB. Maybe I either don’t know how to search very well, or maybe I just don’t really understand the answers that I’m finding, but the typical kind of answer that I’ve come across in the past reads something like this: https://www.howarddierking.com/2014/03/24/surprise-javascript-guard-clauses/ Mon, 24 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.howarddierking.com/2014/03/24/surprise-javascript-guard-clauses/ I spent more time then I had planned this weekend debugging an issue in some code I wrote, and at the end of it all, discovered a JavaScript language feature that I had read about a while ago but never used (intentionally, that is). To explain, consider the following predicate function definition (and yes, I know that Underscore has this function - my specific case would have brought in some additional concepts, so I’m simplfying here).