speaking-javascript-notes.md

Discuss Speaking JavaScript, especially following chapters here:

Chapter 3: The Nature of JavaScript

• "And you can directly create objects, without creating an object factory (e.g., a class) first." I never thought about this until now.
• "It fails silently." Yikes!
• "it has no block-scoped variables." I thought let allowed you to declare a variable within the scope of a block?
• What do you expect for a language that was written in 10 days? It's not perfect!

Chapter 15: Functions

• I like the explanation of the difference between parameters and arguments.
• Hoisting seems very odd to me, when would you call a function before it's declared?
• I really like this: "apply() is useful whenever a function accepts multiple arguments in an array-like manner, but not an array."

Chapter 16: Variables: Scopes, Environments, and Closures

• The "immediately invoked function expression" seems like a messy way to scope a variable.
• IIFE with parameters shorthand is not very readable.
• global variables are bad.
• I remember Steve talking about polyfills in a GDI class once. Interesting that they need to check for global variables.

Chapter 17: Objects and Inheritance

• Dot operator is pretty cool.
• Interesting that deleting properties of objects affects the optimization of performance.
• 'use strict' is starting to seem like something you should always use to avoid the 'pitfalls' of javascript.
• Unclear when you would want to do this: jane.sayHelloTo.call(jane, 'Tarzan');
• bind() will make sure you don't lose connection with a scoped variable, but it will create a new function.
• It's cool javascript will let you protect objects.
• The section on contructors would have been nice to read before doing the Leap javascript exercism.

Some questions to start discussion:

Which sections were interesting?

• Chapters 3 and 15 were a nice overview.

Which sections did you totally skim?

• Environment section in chapter 16.
• Many, many parts of chapter 17.

Do you think the reading was valuable?

• Some of it for sure! Some of it I don't forsee the relevance yet.

Which topics were notably confusing?

• Environments and closures. The graphs made it worse.
• Prototypes, sort of.