Re: Learning Javascript from Lua?

[Tom <tom.wieland@...>]

This is a good resource for advanced javascript topics;
http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Matthew Wild <mwild1@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6 September 2011 19:13, troy wreford <troywreford@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm looking to learn javascript better too. What do you guys miss most from
>> Lua when doing javascript programming?  Metatables? Consistency?
>>
>
> 1) Proper lexical scoping. I was hit by this bug in a real app
> recently (despite knowing JS's scoping rules):
> http://p.zash.se/SVpl9w.txt (that example works with node.js, replace
> sys.puts() with console.log() or whatever environment you want to test
> with)
>
> Many of the folk in the office couldn't say correctly what that script
> prints when I polled them. They more often guessed it printed out what
> the literal Lua translation prints out.
>
> 2) I find the concept of 'this' much less clean than Lua's 'self'.
> Almost every Javascript library or project has a 'bind' function to
> fix a given function's concept of 'this'. I've rarely seen such a
> function in Lua.
>
> 3) I can live fine without metatables in general, but Javascript is
> very prototype-centric, yet makes it incredibly difficult to have one
> ordinary object inherit methods from another object. Douglas Crockford
> has a decent run-down of it here, though even his approach doesn't
> work in all cases (I can't remember which, I hit problems when using
> his solution in a real project):
> http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html
>
> 4) Not being able to use any object/type as a key in an object (ie.
> Javascript has no equivalent of Lua tables):
>
>   > var a = {}, b = {}, c = {};
>   > a[b] = 1; a[c] = 2;
>   > print(a[b]);
>   Result: 2
>
> This happens because b and c are implicitly converted to strings when
> used as keys, so they both evaluate to the key "[object Object]".
>
> And finally, a picture is worth a thousand words, though I know a
> number of you here have seen it already:
> https://plus.google.com/111178996415789377552/posts/RRZHnv92VEq
>
> Regards,
> Matthew
>
>