Fair warning: I shamelessly stole this story from a colleague. Let’s call him Jimmy. He doesn’t have a web presence though, and I think it’s worth sharing.
Jimmy was working on a web application. This particular web application had a feature that only activated on a double-click. Don’t be too harsh on Jimmy; he didn’t have a choice in the matter. Sometimes, you have to do what you have to do.
[Read More]A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend MarkLogic World 2012. The overall theme of the conference was converting Big Data into Big Ideas. Big Data is a paradigm shift for many in the IT industry; briefly, Big Data saves everything, whether it’s usefulness is obvious or not, in hopes that decisions can be made on that data. In theory, the traditional data model would be unable to make informed decisions because the data set would not be large enough accurately describe super-complex issues.
Psychohistory, then, as defined by Isaac Asimov in his novel Foundation, goes something like this:
[Read More]Branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli; implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment.
Javascript can be very expressive and powerful in the right hands. It isn’t without it’s faults, though. For an actual dissection of both the good parts and the bad parts of the language, I recommend Douglas Crockford’s book, Javascript: The Good Parts. In the mean time, take a look at this picture. The difference in page count between the Javascript reference and The Good Parts is pretty accurate :)
