Chapter 6. Advanced Topics and Pitfalls in JavaScript

JavaScript has been called the "assembly language of the web". The analogy (it isn't perfect, but which analogy is?) draws from the fact that JavaScipt is often a target for compilation, namely from Clojure and CoffeeScript, but also from many other sources such as pyjamas (python to JS) and Google Web Kit (Java to JS).

But the analogy also references the foolish idea that JavaScript is as expressive and low-level as x86 assembly. Perhaps this notion stems from the fact that JavaScript has been bashed for its design flaws and oversights ever since it was first shipped with Netscape back in 1995. It was developed and released in a hurry, before it could be fully developed. And because of that, some questionable design choices made its way into JavaScript, the language that soon became the de-facto scripting language of the web. Semicolons were a big mistake. So were its ambiguous methods for defining functions...