The Joys of JS
05 Sep 2019
The Joy
My first impressions of Javascript -coming from a C heavy background - was that it was a lot less technical and down in the weeds language. Worrying about conflicting data types, relying on really easy to understand functions and in general since a lot of the background code is abstracted I didn’t have that much to wrap my head around. As I delve deeper and being exposed to even stranger functions, I realize that there concepts that are complicated within the language that, from my knowledge, can’t be replicated by C. The resouce that was used, was provided by freecodecamp. This nonprofit organization has created programs and certificate that would roughly span 300 hours worth of work. This environment truly paved a good path for would be javascript developers, whether it was students who were picking up another language or a complete newbie to the world of computing.
Ecma’s Script
To add to the deeper understanding of JS, we were exposed to its history. Specifically when it came down to the understanding the standards that JS/Front-end developers adhere to. In this section of freecodecamp, we were introduced to various new functions and quirks that makes a developers life easier. Done are the days of var, ES6 introduces two new type declarations: let and const. The concept of blocking/availability was the major push for the creation of these two types. Let allows developers to create variables that would be only accesible through the block that it was declared in. While const is focused on creating a string, object, variable, etc an immutable state.
Final Thoughts
All in all, i’m excited to be exposed and learn about JS and how it performs in the real world. There are a few quirks within the syntax of the JS that I don’t fully comprehend. Namely how and the importance of the arrow function. This is because from what I understand, its usage is to create functions that node to have a name attach to it. In this way it becomes anonymous and will only be used once the parent function was called. In ES6 we also saw its usage inside variables. This concept will definitely take time to absorb which will need the help of not only the professor, but my peers. Javascript ,from the get go, has not trumped C in terms of favorites, but I can see it being an important and productive lesson on connecting the circuits within a web application.